How do you handle bugs during sprint planning?

[Mike Lyons]

How do you handle bugs during the sprint planning meetings? All of the stories in the backlog are given story points. The team has capacity of X story points per sprint. So I know how many stories I can fit into a sprint but how do I add bugs into this mix since a bug does not have a story point estimate on it?

Thanks,

Mike

[Renjith Pillai · Accepted solution]

You can simply add the story point field for bugs in context of that field and use that for planning. But the most practical way is to have a fixed value for story point for bug and use that for planning. And remember, adding the story point value to bug has a serious drawback, it will start showing up in velocity, which is very very bad. Delivering bug corrections does not add value to customer. Bug corrections just make up for the lost value for the customer.