Should a user story be reopened for enhancements?

[Paul Stephen]

A user story for a particular function has been implemented in production. After go live, the business has a small enhancement to the function. Should the user story be reopened for the enhancement?

[James Marin]

I agree, if the ticket is for a new change then that means the scope changed so a new ticket would be advised. This allows the change to be prioritized and team capacity to be accounted against the new work.

If the ticket is just reopened then it should be placed into the team backlog, prioritized and added to a sprint; however, now the effort that your team put into this request are the original story points + additional story points to make the new change but in reality the story points may only reflect the new work effort in the sprint otherwise it'll through your capacity off and the true effort to complete this request (original + new change) is not truly reflected. 

If you expect many of these tickets/changes I would create new tickets.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

That's a question about your processes, not one we can really answer.

Generally, assuming a pretty standard and common way of doing things, no, you'd create a new issue, but that might not be the way your organisation really wants to work.  If it were me, I'd only re-open issues that have goine into a production system if they failed, got rolled back, or switched off.  An enhancement to production is a new enhancement to my mind.  But that's just the way I'd do it.

[Thomas Schlegel]

Hi Paul,

we do not reopen closed issues when there are small enhancements. Since this is a new requirement, this should be handled in a new issue.

We just reopen an issue, if the implementation was not correct.