What is the best practice for handling known issues, to avoid having people creating same bugs again

[Haris Siddiqui]

Question: Basically my question can be divided into two parts. 

1. How to manage cases or scenarios which are not required to be worked on, or does not really fall into the category of requirements? Should there be another platform where all such cases are mentioned area-wise? and the person who run into that issue again, check that area first instead of investigating & reporting it. 

2. We can have obsolete cases and known bugs, which we agree upon, that no further development will be done. How to manage those cases?

Example: I recently found a bug and created a task for it,but it was closed later on by test lead on client side. The reason for closing the task was the end-user is not being affected by the issue thus there's no development  needed. Now what's the best approach to handle this scenario, so no other person reports the same issue again in future and invest their time on it.

[Carlos Garcia Navarro]

Hi Haris,

These are interesting questions. When you say it doesn't affect a customer, do you mean that it's not applicable to the version that the client is using? If so, with JIRA you could record the versions affected using a field such as 'Affected Versions' so it's easy to determine which customers may be affected by correlating an issue to the customers running the corresponding versions. Also, you could use something like suggestions in JIRA when reporting an issue (e.g., I've used JIRA Service Desk where suggestions of similar issues have been entered based on key words.)

In any case, with JIRA you can create and use custom fields to track information about when a case is obsolete or a known issue.

Hope it helps,

Carlos

[Scott Theus]

Hi @Haris Siddiqui ,

Do you publish release notes with each version you put out? If so you could include a "known issues" list in the notes for customers to refer to when they experience a bug that was not addressed before the version was released. 

I also suggest that you have a list of known issue for your QA analysts to check when they are testing.  A knowledge base in Confluence or even just a page for listing out the known issues in each version would be ideal for this;  you could link between the known issues list in Confluence and the bugs in Jira. And...if you give your customers and support teams read-only access to the pages in Confluence you could reduce the number of support calls coming in and/or the resolution time on those calls. 

-Scott