Managing Bugs with Scrum | #2782 - Agile software development, patterns and practices for building Microsoft .NET applications.

Managing Bugs with Scrum | #2782 - Agile software development, patterns and practices for building Microsoft .NET applications.: "

The bug tax

There’s actually another completely different reason for minimizing the number of active bugs… Tax.

Having a lot of active bugs means that you have to manage them, triage them, track open/closed and fixed rates. All this takes time and effort and adds no value to the product. Imagine if you only had seven bugs to track? Two relating to work in the current sprint, these are being worked on by the team. The remaining five are to be prioritized and worked on in the next sprint. With seven active bugs you don’t need long triage meetings and reports!

The tax of dealing with bugs is greatly reduced and you can spend more time working on features. I worked on a project a while back where we ended up with a large number of bugs kicking around. Eventually things came to a head and we got the number down to something mush more manageable and it was amazing how much time we saved by not having to track these bugs not to mention time spent working with buggy features."