Have some way to mark an incident as a duplicate

[srabraham]

We often end up with multiple IMS incidents for the same actual incident, and it would be nice to have a good way to close out one of those as a duplicate of the other.

There are many ways this could be achieved, so I'd just say that the gold standard would be something like:

1. user notices that incident 2 is really the same thing as incident 1
2. user marks on the incident 2 page that this incident is a duplicate of incident 1
3. IMS automatically resolves incident 2 in some closed state
4. IMS automatically comments on both incidents indicating what happened (providing links in both lists of incident details from the one incident to the other)

[srabraham]

We'll probably just achieve this the simplest way, by adding a new Incident Type of "Duplicate"

[wsanchez]

A relationship between incidents is something that I do agree could be useful.

Duplicate as a keyword is OK, but you do want the system to know what it's a duplicate of. Then we might do something like we do with field reports, in that we could insert an incidents report entries into the incident that it is a duplicate of.

I would probably want to ensure that if there are multiple duplicates (A, B, C) of incident X, that they are all referring to the same "authoritative" incident. So:

• A is marked as a duplicate of B. OK.
• B is marked as a duplicate of X. System them makes A a duplicate of X instead of B.
• C is marked as a duplicate of B. System changes B to a duplicate of X.
• X get marked as duplicate of Y. System changes A, B, C to duplicates of Y.
• Y get marked as duplicate of A. System changes A, B, C, X to duplicates of A.

Not sure that's necessary, but it does remove the need to chase down duplicates through each other to find the relevant report entries, and eliminates the possibility of cycles.