Is there a good way to track a defect through multiple releases?

[Anon Anon]

Does anybody have a good solution for tracking a defect that impacts multiple releases? Even if we duplicate the defect for each impacted release, there is no easy way to see the state of the defect across all releases. Creating a parent story or associated all the duplicated defects to a defect suite requires a lot of manual overhead.

Thanks.

[Anon Anon]

Hi Debbie, I think the answer might be in a change in your way of approaching the problem. Agile Central is more of an activity tracker not necessarily an issue tracker. To ensure that you associate the defect with all the releases (and here is another thought process change required), you can associate tasks with the defect along the lines of:

Task 1: Fix this problem in Release 1.1
Task 2: Fix this problen in Release 1.2.1 (for Vodafone)

If you replace the word "Release" in your original question with "code-drop", then it might become clearer why I mention the second change of thought. The "Release" artefact in Agile Central is effectively a planning timebox not specifically related to a code-drop to your product delivery.

When you decide to plan in the "activity" of fixing the defect, you can choose to add tasks to it to cover the (code-drop) releases that you want to fix and you can plan that activity into an Iteration (Agile Central term) which might be within the start/end dates of a Release (Agile Central term).

One of the things you can do is add a custom field to your defect type (e.g. "Affects CodeDrop") to contain the release numbers you want to fix it for.

[Legacy User]

Further to Nik's suggestion, if you're defining Release as a component software release then we use Milestones instead. The benefit there is that you can attach a work item to multiple Milestones. I agree with Nik that you may get some benefit from breaking down the defect fix into tasks but I'd definitely look at Milestones as a potential substitute for Releases.