How would you do it differently? For someone I worked with closely, sure, I'd just paste the ticket ID and start talking to them about it.
When I have to talk to someone whom I don't have an existing relationship with and maybe only have a tenuous recommendation to talk to them about an issue I think it's a reasonable place to start. They might actually not know about the thing I'm asking about and have a better idea of who to speak to.
Imagine somebody responded to that message with “Sure, what’s up?” Now imagine what you would write in response to that. Then just send that along with the original message.
So instead of:
> Hey Bob, this is Alice, I work on the QA team in Dublin. I'm looking at an issue I think you might be able to help me with http://jira.yourcorp.org/browse/ORDERS-1234. Would you have a minute to discuss this?
…you might write something like this:
> Hey Bob, this is Alice, I work on the QA team in Dublin. I'm looking at an issue I think you might be able to help me with http://jira.yourcorp.org/browse/ORDERS-1234. I’m following the steps, but I can’t reproduce the problem. I see it’s a couple of weeks old, is it possible this is fixed already? Can you still reproduce this?
In fact, normally a question like this is a sign something is wrong elsewhere anyway. Why isn’t the discussion about the issue taking place in the issue tracker? If anybody else has to pick this up, they will be missing all the info from the discussion that took place elsewhere.
I don't think that is much of an improvement. Assuming you don't know the contents of the issue at hand your going to have to go away and take a look and by someone asking if you have a moment to look at it they are giving you an explicit opportunity to say I'll take a look at it this afternoon / tomorrow / before the heat death of the universe. Again, if there was an established relationship between me and the person asking then it may not be necessary. In any case it's still 100x better than a "hey, how are you?" from some random who couldn't give two shits about how you really were.
Issue trackers are poor at back and forth discussion in my experience. Yes, you need to make sure that any important information or the conclusion of a separate discussion is recorded in the ticket but it would take all day to have a short conversation about an item, the whole time every person who'd ever looked at the ticket in the wrong tone of voice gets an email alert.
Just begin the discussion.
I think a lot of people do this because they are bad/slow at typing and don't want to bother leveling up.