Bug Management System in Agile Frameworks

Being agile is contingent on the capability of the organization of making swift yet measured decisions and adapting to the rapidly changing environment. Hence the error and bug management systems have to follow this philosophy in order to operate in the agile frameworks. As opposed to the rigidly managed scope of the traditional waterfall software project, the scope of agile projects is much more flexible. The software development teams that use agile frameworks let the project requirements be defined iteratively, as the agile development teams tend to embrace change and acknowledge the fact that the project requirements will evolve throughout the development phase. Keeping in consideration that customer satisfaction is one of the primary determinants of the project success, therefore, agile projects not only require continuous customer engagement but also demand that a bug management tool be embedded in the development cycle from the initial phase.

Agile Framework Strategy for Bug Management

Generally, there are two dominant strategies for the bug management system in agile projects. As per to the first strategy, after the detection of the bug in the software application, the first step is to determine the intensity level of the problem, and to measure its impact on the functionality and performance of the entire software application. Ranging from low/trivial to critical, there are five different levels of severity, including;

Severity 1 – a defect in the system which endangers the personnel safety or prevents the application from moving forward by jeopardizing a mission essential function.

Severity 2 – a defect which has a negative impact on the essential operations and functions of the software and it has no other alternatives available.

Severity 3 – a defect which has an adverse effect on the essential operations and functions of the software but there are adequate alternatives available for this error.

Severity 4 – an error which causes a glitch in the operations or user inconvenience, therefore affecting the mission essential functions

Severity 5 – all other trivial errors

Within this framework, the risk based testing i.e. risk matrix is also employed to prioritize the bugs; risk matrix essentially categorizes the bugs based on the probability of the problem occuring and its impact on the software application if it does. Hence, a bug which has a high probability and high impact would be scheduled and allocated to the development team as a priority.

The second agile strategy for the bug management system is based on the school of thought which refers to avoiding bugs in the first place. According to this strategy, the agile framework uses the bug management tool to respond quickly and accurately to the customer demands with the help of short and flexible software development cycles. Within this strategy, the agile development teams make use of this tool for effective collaboration to prioritize bugs throughout the continuous delivery process and working in real time to identify bugs in their product in the initial stages of development and mitigate them promptly to avoid unnecessary costs.

As a result of employing bug management systems in the agile frameworks, the organization is not only able to reduce development and quality assurance cycles, but they can also improve team productivity, thus releasing a high quality software product.