Does adding bugs during the sprint affect your charts?

Jihae Choi March 3, 2020

My team estimates all our stories and during an active sprint, after a story is done, our QA may find bugs. If bugs are created for the active sprint stories, what's the best way so it does not mess up our burndown, velocity charts? 

 

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carlosughini
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March 3, 2020

Hello Jihae,

Hope you are having a good day.

Directly answering your question, yes, adding bugs during the sprint affect your charts. 

Now, I would just like to leave a few comments and some points of view.

There are some 'workarounds' for this type of situation. Some companies just create a new subtask issue type, for example, Defect, or even use Subtasks, with 0 points, so it won't affect the chart, as subtasks and story bugs don't get points assigned. In other words, raise them as subtasks without estimates, and re-open the parent, as it's not 'done'.

Other companies never put them in the current sprint, unless they're critical and should be classed as scope creep. In the next planning meeting, put all bugs at the top of the backlog and deal with them as the next sprint items.

In case you decide to reopen issues with subtasks, you need to ensure that your managers understand that you're doing it this way so that when other things don't get done, you can explain that defects are affecting you.

In case you opt to handle the bugs in the next sprint, you will often get whinging and incomprehension from users who think that because they found a bug, you should throw away all your planning and deal with it immediately. 

But remember that, by not estimating bugs, you get rid of the issue that they have a visual impact on your burn down.

Of course, they do have an impact on the amount of real work the team can do and depending on the number of bugs, it could be that the team will not finish all the work they committed.

Hope that I was properly able to help with something, Jihae. :)

Cheers,

Carlos

ashley durant July 20, 2021

@carlosughini 

Hello,

If Bugs that are incurred during current Sprint development that are a high enough severity that they need to be worked on in this Sprint and will affect the amount of work that the developers have and Story's will slip. We have this issue every Sprint where our developers are never able to complete several Sprint items due to their Bugs. 

How do you handle this? How do you account for the Scope Creep? During Sprint planning?

Also, some developers always incur a higher amount of Bugs than others. How to account for this?

Thank you!

Ashley

0 votes
Maroun Maroun March 1, 2023

I'd like to share with you the approach we use at my company. Whenever unexpected issues arise that require urgent attention, we create a task labeled as "showstopper". We don't assign estimates or track time for these tasks.

To accommodate for these changes, we allocate 15%-20% of our sprint's capacity during planning. At the retrospective, we review all the showstoppers and assess their impact on the burndown chart.

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