How to Integrate Bug Fixes into Your Backlog?

 

Teams using Scrum have to deal with the sheer complexity of projects by prioritizing, evaluating, and translating product backlogs into enhancements to potentially useful features and often also need to maintain a production system or eliminate errors that they encounter again during development. What do we need to monitor and prioritize?  How do we address the disaster? Who will provide production support?

Bug Of The Day

The support for production can be viewed as disrupting teams that simply want to continue but is often at the system users’ heart, and therefore one of the scrum roles, product owner. This problem can be difficult to solve as it further complicates the discussion on prioritization. Production support is critical, so don't dilly-dally about adding new features. When the system goes down, adding new features does more harm than good. To get your new code working with the existing architecture, you should focus on that first.

However, such an approach to production support cannot be planned - just taking care of it when it occurs can distract us from the most appropriate solutions in the face of the "bug of the day" scenario. It's easy to forget our strategic plan and vision as soon as we address the recent problem of the system.

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First Step

In most cases, solution teams that are initially deployed must effectively have two backlogs: for development features and for production support problems. During planning, the product owner sets a target metric for the team to assume, such as 70% development and 30% backlog support. This is probably not too different from the fact that the team simply reduces its ability to perform support tasks and successfully hides the problem, avoids talking about priorities, and increases the stress of suboptimal work.

Because support for the production in this scenario is usually not readily predictable in the user stories form and often occurs during sprints, teams experience development stories and burn production support. The team can review the relationship between its features and bugs daily, so it can report problems and improvements to the product owner. There is a risk that all production support will collapse before the end of the sprint, when the sprint is smaller, the potential impact of this situation is also shorter.

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Bug As Feature Request

For many projects, production teams divide the backlog into two separate lists: resources required to deliver a product and its business value. This division presents a problem. By combining these two lists, we can clearly question whether or not we are making “right” things—i.e., “things that matter.” While this adds complexity to the product owner, it permits the scrum team to focus on what's essential. The team still has the option to select synergies to increase overall value, leading to another exciting way to solve manufacturing problems.

Emergencies

If the problem is really urgent, the product owner should be allowed to play the "emergency card" if he/she knows the cost - if he/she fails to complete the work we have planned, and this could jeopardize the sprint objective. If this arises often, consider a maintenance sprint to eliminate some of the technical debts that can cause many of these issues. Another option is to reduce the sprints, the periods of time during which you plan to develop the system.

 

There are several options for teams to solve the production support problem, and while there is no "right way," we saw the greatest benefit when teams treat production support and feature requests equally. When a team is willing to take on the challenge of solving prioritization problems by reconciling support problems with backlog development and thus maintaining the product backlog. These teams focus on improving their process while using the product and use the acceptance tests for support purposes. This approach not only gives us more opportunities to do the 'right' things, but it also shows that the team is ready to make potentially difficult decisions on the way to a more agile working way.

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