How have you handled bugs found in a user story?

[Paul Siu]

So let's say you have a user story and during QA, they found a bug. How do you handle the bug?

In some projects, I have seen people create a bug and then link it to the story. In some projects, they are handled as a subtask in the story. In some projects, the story just get reassigned to the developers with the bugs in the comments.

After trying each, I seem to favor linking a bug to the story. The chief reason is that not all bugs get fixed at release. My feeling is that if the bug is low priority enough or rare enough, the team might chose to release it and fix it later. This also allow the QA team to get a list of bugs and their status.

I am curious to know how others handle this, since there is no right way to do things but different ways with different pros and cons.

[Michel Neeser]

Hi @Paul Siu

In our team, we use this approach:

If the bug results from a story which is being developed in the current sprint, we create a subtask for the story. Then, the subtask gets immediately assigned to a developer who worked on the story. If the bug cannot be fixed by the end of the sprint, the story including the subtask moves to the next sprint. This way, it is clearly visible at all times that the story is not finished yet.

Sometimes, however, we decide to fix a bug later because it is a rare edge case or very low priority. In that case, we create a new issue in the backlog and link it to the story.

Previously, we also worked with the approach "reassign the story to the developer with a comment". But this way, the remaining work wasn't really visible on the sprint board, so we moved away from it.

[John Price]

That's what I've done too. 

Bugs during story dev = subtasks if needed vs. just a comment

Bugs in prod or deferred = Bug linked to Story.  

[Paul Siu]

Thanks. Do you ever have something like bugs that the customer decided it was ok to ship with. For example, the control is the wrong color and for whatever reason it was too hard to fix but they are ok shipping with it.  My thought was if the story is release, then it should be considered done and not get move to the next sprint. If the bug is separate and linked to the task, then it can be independantly handled but the visibility is lowered.

[Michel Neeser]

@Paul Siu If the story can be shipped because the bug is minor, then we close the story and file a new bug in the backlog linked to the original story. This would be our way to go in the case you described.

[Paul Siu]

That makes sense. Thank you for the info.