Effective Techniques For Bug Tracking In JIRA

[John Bacon]

What are some effective ways to perform bug/defect management using JIRA?  

One method we developed is that once a bug/defect is discovered, a bug issue type is created.  The bug issue type is put into an In Development status, and then once a resolution to the bug is determined, the bug issue is moved to a Complete status, and a corresponding User Story is created for the development required to fix the bug.

My thoughts are, however that this creates a little extra work, and instead, log the defect by creating a bug issue, and update its workflow status as it progresses from identification, to development, to testing, to production release, and then updating the bug to complete.

Not sure if closing out the bug and creating a user story to address development for fixing the bug is the most efficient and effective bug management process using JIRA.

How do you manage defects using JIRA? 

[Jimi Wikman]

First, separate Incidents from defects.

Incidents come from production and defects are found in testing during development.

Defects I usually add as sub-tasks in the story, effectively blocking it from being closed until the defect is either resolved, or lifted out as a stand-alone defect (known defect). For exploratory defects, I add them as stand-alone defects unless it is known what story they are releated to.

Incidents are always stand-alone, and the issue type identify them as Incidents and the Priority is the Incident priority connected to SLA.

Incidents and Defects have the same workflow as development, but with 2 additional statuses: Triage and Rejected. Triage is where you do incident/defect management to verify the reported incident or defect. Rejected is the soft close that allow people to improve the report if it can not be reproduced.

You can see an example of this in my old presentation on designing for Atlassian:
https://youtu.be/VGSccqGmoys?t=221