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I've noticed that a lot of discussion between a developer and a Product Owner happens in private conversations in various communication tools (Skype, Slack, email, etc). The reason is because these tools are more convenient for communication than Jira.
Are there any good practices to avoid this?
From Agile manifesto:
Your objective is NOT to avoid communication. You want to promote it. People in a project must communicate in the most effective way they see fit. I believe you should shift the focus of your energy, changing the question you're looking for answers to questions such as
These questions might help you fine tune the specific needs for your context. There's no canonical answer as it heavily depends on your environment.
Environment #1: Junior team, low confidence between parts, time zone differences. You still want to keep conversations flowing, but you want to have it written somewhere for future reference. Each conversation might be related to a specific ticket, so the outcomes of this conversation could be summarised as a jira comment. Special attention to outcomes and summarised. You definitely do not want transcripts of conversations (as I saw someone doing some years ago).
Environment #2: Seasoned team, high confidence between members. On these cases, there's no better "communication" than working software. Nothing else needs to be written.
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Remember: Everything that's not directly contributing to delivery, is a waste. Oftentimes, wastes are needed, but a team doesn't need to stick to them for the sake of the methodology. A methodology is just a mean, a tool for a purpose, not an objective in itself. Your focus should always be on the consistent delivery, not on consistent methodology usage.
First and foremost, you can't use tools to solve this. If there is any problem here, it's a people problem and a communication problem. I say 'if' because this may be fine. Maybe it's something that really only effects them. Or maybe they are, after their 1-on-1, sharing the info with the right people.
If you are seeing impacts where info isn't being shared from those conversations and it's impacting how the team works, my best recommendation would be to raise those impacts at the retro and then as a team, discuss how you'd like to work differently to avoid those impacts. If they are using other tools instead of Jira, maybe Jira is a poor tool for that communication, but other options exist, like having the slack conversation in the team chat instead of 1-on-1. I'm confident the team can find the solution that works well for them, makes communication easy, and avoids accidental side-effects.
Jira is not a communication tool, but that doesn't mean you can't add information gained elsewhere to a ticket.
If something is unclear in the ticket description, by all means ask around until you understand it, and then come back and update the ticket description. If your conversation unearths missing acceptance criteria or a link that would be relevant to anyone who implements (or just looks at) a task, go ahead and add it.
Note that while you can use comments to have a conversation inside a Jira ticket, a long comment thread can easily get out of hand. It's also easier for comments to go out of date than a description (which can be updated by anyone). Comments are a good way to get someone's attention, though, and to get specific questions answered, for example when you need more details about a task or bug report.
Tiago's answer and Llewellyn's answer both give good perspectives on the overall approach. However, I'd take a slightly different approach.
Since Jira tends to be more accessible than an individual's email inbox and private Slack channels or DMs, I tend to think of Jira as the source of truth and use integrations to allow people to push content into Jira when it's appropriate.
What you should consider is a way to get information out of these other tools and into Jira. Fortunately, Jira has integrations for email, Slack, Teams, and other tools that can help to either link content to the Jira ticket or get content attached to the Jira ticket as attachments or comments. The integrations with Slack, for example, allow people to receive issue notifications and make certain edits, including leaving comments, without leaving Slack. There are similar integrations for Gmail and Outlook as well as more generic emails to and from Jira.
