Agile – How do bug reports factor in to a sprint

agileproject-managementscrum

I've been reading up on Scrum recently. From my understanding, a meeting is held before the sprint starts, to decide what gets moved from the product backlog to the upcoming sprint backlog. Once a feature is completed in the current sprint, it will go into the "Ready to QA" bucket, and it's at this point that I'm getting confused. Do bug reports go back into the product backlog? I assume they can't go back into the sprint backlog as we've already decided what work will be done for this cycle? What happens when QA finds a bug? Where does it go?

Best Answer

The way I see it there are two main solutions to this:

  1. Don't allocate 100% of your time to the current sprint. Allow 10-15% of your time for bug fixing and other support activities that will come up during the sprint. Then if a blocking bug comes up you have the time to fix it in the current sprint.

    If a non blocking bug comes up you can either fix it at the end of the current sprint if you have the time left over or it goes into the "pot" for the next sprint.

  2. Have a "bug fixing" sprint every so often. Probably just before the next major release. You can use this to "mop up" as many bugs as you can/want to fix for the next release.

Neither of these solutions is probably true to "pure" Scrum, but they work in the real world.

During a "regular" sprint you can still include tasks to fix specific bugs, treating them as you would a piece of new functionality.

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