In a recent post on the Scrum Alliance forum at LinkedIn, a member asked this question:

How do teams handle defects that have been found after a user story has been accepted and released to Production?

My first thought was to just log a defect against the user story, but that screws up reporting as it removes the Accepted status. Executives do not want to see that. I am thinking we should just create a new user story and slate it for the next Sprint. ?

My answer:

Defects are bound to be found after a story has been accepted and released to production; that’s just a very normal part of software development, so it makes sense to add them to the Product Backlog to prioritize for a future Sprint.

There isn’t any need to take the “Accepted” status off a story that was already considered done within an older Sprint: “Accepted” doesn’t mean “super-excellent and done for all time”; it just means it was considered good enough by the Product Owner at the conclusion of the Sprint, and therefore accepted.

To “un-accept” stories post facto would not just screw up your reporting; it would start to create an unhealthy dynamic between the Scrum team and the Product Owner, where the Product Owner starts to believe he can reject stories post facto.

For Scrum to work well as a process, you need to get everyone to buy into the core idea that stuff gets done in iterations; new stuff gets done in new iterations; old stuff gets improved in future iterations.

On a more tactical level, Kerika lets you link together individual cards or even entire Scrum Boards, because every board, every card, every canvas has a unique URL that you can reference anywhere in the system to create dynamic links between stories and boards.

So, if we find a bug in a previously accepted story, we create a new card for that and simply reference the old card in the new card’s details.  Here’s a video that shows how that’s easy with Kerika.