How Defect and Enhancements (agile development) are actually designed to work?

[Suggy]

1. How Defect and Enhancements (agile development) are actually designed to work? like its lifecycle?

2. Is it something which can be exposed to end users or it shouldn't? as a best practice

3. Incident vs Defect? which one to use and when? any criteria around it?

Especially regarding point 3, we had a discussion for an hour. What happened is, we deployed new record producers (created via stories) to PROD. User found some wrong variable mapping.

Now should an incident be created or Defect?

[Suggy]

Hi @Doug Page  thanks for pointing out to CWM. That is something I have not come across.  Let me explore that product. 

But is that something related to Defect and Enhancement modules of Agile?

[Doug Page]

Yes, you can bring in Defect and Enhancement requests into CWM to manage them from a work  planning perspective.

[kaushal_snow]

@Suggy ,

In an Agile environment within ServiceNow, defects and enhancements follow a shared lifecycle, starting from creation, scoping, design, development, testing, change approval, deployment, and finally closure, with the flexibility to move backward for rework, and they often get linked to stories or backlog items for traceability........

Since defects represent deviations from expected or agreed behavior and enhancements represent new or improved behavior, exposing either to end users should be done cautiously, typically only with controlled visibility (e.g. via a feedback portal), not full internal workflow details..... As for incident vs defect, an incident is about an unplanned service disruption or degradation, while a defect is a flaw in code or configuration against requirements, so in your scenario (variable mapping went wrong in a deployed record producer), that would generally be classified as a defect (not an incident) because it’s a functionality issue rather than a service outage.....

If you found my response helpful, please mark it as ‘Accept as Solution’ and ‘Helpful’. This helps other community members find the right answer more easily and supports the community.

[Suggy]

Anyone please?

[jameswoodfo]

Hello, Suggy,

My answer is going to focus on #3.

You've been working on a story and the story has been internally tested but not yet deployed to production. As a part of client unit testing or client UAT, they discovered that what has been configured in the story is not working per the acceptance criteria. This is a defect.

Your work has passed testing and has been deployed to production. You have agreed upon functionality that has been successfully tested and then deployed to production. A user finds that something is not working correctly with that functionality. That's an incident.

Does that help?