Question

HI, I am new to the scrum methodology and looking for some help to get comfortable with the environment and wondering if there needs to be a bucket to track Developers and QA hours spent on deployments and bug fixes and retests. Seems like it could have major impact on the graph.

Answer 1

My team is supporting a number of legacy apps, so there’s quite a bit of unplanned bug fixing that occurs during each sprint. We’ve adopted the following practice:

• If the bug is easy/quick to fix (one liner, etc), then just fix it.
• If the bug is not trivial, and not a blocker, then add it to the backlog.
• If the bug is a blocker then add a task (to the current sprint) to capture the work required to fix it, and start working on it. This requires that something else be moved (from the current sprint) to the backlog to account for the new hours because your total hours available hasn’t changed.

When we add new bug tasks we’ll mark them differently from the planned tasks so make them easy to see during the sprint review. Sometimes unplanned work ends up being >50% of our sprint, but because we’re pushing planned items to the backlog we know very early what we’re not delivering this sprint that we had planned on.

This has proven to be very useful for our team in dealing with legacy apps where none of us are as familiar or confident with the systems as we’d like to be.