Handling of Deferred Story Defects or Defects found During Iteration/Release Testing?

Alison Clough

Hi All - hoping to get some guidance from all of you experts out there I've got a couple of questions related to defect tracking in JIRA. We are looking to create a new "story defect" subtask in our instance for teams to track defects found during story testing. However, there are a couple of scenarios I'm unsure how to handle...

1. What is a story defect subtask is deferred? That is, what if there is a decision not to fix right away and take on as technical debt. Is there a best practice for what to convert the subtask to? 
2. What about defects found during iteration/release testing when there isn't necessarily a specific story to align a story defect subtask to? Do folks recommend creating a story for the release/iteration testing and then log the defects found as story defect subtasks or would you create a specific issue type for logging the release/iteration testing defects found? 

Your input is greatly appreciated.

John Funk

Hi Alison - Welcome to the Community!

1. For our process, any Defect that is not going to be immediately fixed is converted to a Bug issue type. (Which is not a Sub-task type for us, by the way). 

Our definition - Defect - identified during QA Testing and must be fixed now and code cannot be deployed until the Defect is fixed. Bug - something doesn't work correctly, but we acknowledge that and will release the code anyway. We will fix it when we have time. Same goes with items found in Production - we consider all of them to be Bugs. 

2. We would still classify those as Bugs since the don't directly relate to current code/stories being deployed. But we could Expedite the priority if needed to get it out the door with the rest of the code. 

I hope that helps!