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One of my team mates and I just grabbed separate bug tickets, assigned them separately to ourselves, but the tickets were duplicates!
What is the best way to resolve duplicate tickets? Is this generally done by QA resources? I've worked at a couple places where non-tech people say it interrupts there "flow", but it is something a non-technical person could do in a situation where access to developers is limited (i.e. basically always).
Really, everyone should make a reasonable effort to avoid duplicates, but developers are usually in the best position to do so. Bugs can be found by many people, but usually are filtered to one developer or a small team responsible for that area of code. Also, you often need the code to determine if two different symptoms have the same root cause. All bug trackers can handle duplicates pretty easily. You shouldn't worry about them popping up occasionally.
On the other hand, if they happen all the time, you're just duplicating testers' effort, and might want to reevaluate how you allocate your testing resources.
Submit the code changes under one ticket, then resolve the other ticket with a note that says "this is a duplicate, code is under bug# xxx".
This happens all the time.
This should be done during the planning process. When the bugs are initially triaged and prioritized, the person doing that ranking should make sure that there aren't duplicates in the main backlog.
See the positive side as well: If the same bug was found twice independently, then it should be easier to reproduce. Both by developers and by customers :-( so it might be higher priority to fix.
You'll often have one person who should prioritise bugs and also removes duplicates, either your manager or a single person with that task. Should be more efficient that way, instead of you picking a bug, and then going through the whole bug list to check for similar ones.
Worst case if you don't avoid duplicates is when you fix the bug, and then the next guy wastes a lot of time to reproduce a bug that is irreproducible because it's gone.
