Defect Management in Scrum

One of the key aspects of Scrum that makes teams perform better is organising the flow of work. The backlog of a team is its only source, and because it’s prioritised the team is guaranteed to always deliver valuable features. So much for theory. In reality a team has to deal with a lot of distractions that make it hard to focus on delivering the sprint goal: issues, outage, bugs, changing requirements; stuff that “absolutely cannot wait”.

Indeed, defects need to be dealt with. As a Scrum Team you face the daunting task of making sense of it all to come to a decision how to deal with a request. Luckily there are some guidelines to help you make a decision how to deal with these things.

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This week: jetlag, broke pipes and sunk dreams

It’s been quite an interesting week, although I probably would not categorize it as a good one.

It practically started of with me going back to work with one heck of a jetlag. I thought just sunday as a rest day was enough. Guess I got that wrong. Monday felt like I was dragging my heels everywhere. Frankly I remember very little of how I got by that day. I was just glad it was over.

The following days were better, or at least I was not as fatigued as I was. My wife is still in the States taking care of things for her father, who suffered a stroke. This week has been one of loneliness. I am glad I can stay over at my parents for the time being and was happy to get out on wednesday and have some food and laughs with friends.

Thursday things took yet another turn for the ‘interesting’. My father, who tried to unblock my drain in the kitchen managed to punch a hole out of the wrong side of the drain. This is not as much the doing of my poor father, who -after all- just wanted to help, but the death throes of a drain that had apparently been abused by unblocking chemicals too much and decided to give in. Next thursday the plumber will come to fix the problem.

That evening it was also decided that my hosting company, which I co-own with a friend, is going to close its doors. The reason being the ever increasing costs of co-location and fees for registering domains versus the relatively small volume of customers. Frankly, the fun had already been taken out of  the job for some time now as the NOC decided to raise prices by more than 50% twice a year.

Can’t wait to see what next week will look like.