According to the Project Management Institute, 71% of organizations use Agile approaches.
The agile approach minimizes defects producing high-quality software. While agile has fewer bugs to fix than traditional software development frameworks, it too can run into difficulties with bug management. This is because each iteration is short and quick decisions have to be made on which bugs to fix and which to put off. If bugs are not caught and resolved at the right time, the backlog can grow to unmanageable volumes.
To select suitable bug management tools for your business, it is important to know about the useful bug management techniques employed by the Agile development process.
Here is what to remember about bug management processes in Agile developed apps:
- Defects are identified by methods of inspection, testing, product metrics, and refactoring.
- Defects are eliminated by methods of prevention, removal, tolerance, and forecasting.
- Inspections are made for requirements defects and implementation defects.
- Defect repair costs are assessed early.
- Testing is a collaborative work of the agile team. It involves developers and the Product Owner.
- A defect tracking system uses techniques of tracking and analysis.
- Agile focuses on identifying two kinds of defects: functional and regression.
- Functional defects are fixed in each iteration or approved as open by the Product Owner. These defects are related to a particular user story.
- No additional code is integrated until all functional defects are eliminated. They are fixed first by the user story priority and next by defect priority.
- Regression defects are detected at a customer site. These are not handled in the iterations as they are unrelated to a specific user story.
- Regression defects are placed in the sprint/ product backlog with priority. As defects are measured across releases, escaped defects are zero.
- In the Daily Scrum, the team is made aware of the defect, its severity and its impact on achieving the sprint goal.
- Refactoring is changing the code’s internal structure without a change in external performance. This makes the code easily readable. Information about defects in the source code is stored in automation language.
- Defects are removed in each iteration.
- Test cases are used to identify defects. The selection of test cases is made by distinguishing functional and regression defects.
- Test cases are added to the automation suite. After sprint completion, the automated regression suite is used.
- Orthogonal Defect Classification (ODC) is a defect management technique that provides unique, non-redundant attribute definitions of defect classification. It prevents defects from being injected into the code.
- Indication of bugs follows a cyclic manner of reporting, fixing, and verification.
- The functionality of a previous sprint can be combined with the functionality of the next sprint. This helps to make changes in units of former sprints.
- Defect management meeting is a time-boxed meeting where team members meet face to face to try to understand the nature and impact of defects on the application. Existing defects are removed and new defects are prioritized based on severity. Responsibility to fix the defects is assigned.
- Defect Causal Analysis (DCA): Defects are prevented by identifying the root causes of the defects followed by their classification.
- Acceptance tests close all defect decisions
