We should only have one ticket on the board for any given piece of work. This should be obvious and yet I see this problem on a regular basis.
A common pattern is that we’ll have a story on the board and while that is being worked on, someone will discover something that isn’t working and will open a bug ticket which also gets moved to “in progress”. Now we have two tickets on the board, at the same time, for the same piece of work.
Not only does this introduce noise into the system which skews metrics, it also confuses intent. There aren’t two pieces of work in play - there is only one and that one thing is incomplete.
The definition of a bug that I introduce to teams has three parts.
- We knew what it was supposed to do
- It doesn’t do that thing
- We said we were done.
By opening a new bug ticket while the first one is still open, we are violating that third condition. Until we’ve said the first piece of work is complete, any problems we find are just incomplete work, they’re not bugs.
How might we track that incomplete work? We could write a comment on that ticket or if your ticketing system supports sub-tasks or action items then we could create one of those.
What we don’t want to do is create another top level ticket at the same level as the original story.