A card hits done. Someone immediately finds a bug. Now there’s an argument about what to do next.

Two options come up every time:

1. Reopen the story and fix it there.
2. Open a new card for the fix.

The answer depends on the bug. If the product owner can live with it and it’s low impact, option 2 is reasonable. Log it, prioritize it, move on.

But if the bug blocks value from reaching users, or if it was introduced while working on that exact story, the story was never done. Reopening it isn’t a punishment. It’s accurate.

Teams resist this. Nobody wants to walk back something they already got credit for. That’s understandable, but your definition of done exists for a reason. Quality is part of it. This one slipped through.

The soup analogy holds here. You order a bowl, find a fly in it, and send it back. The kitchen fixes it. They don’t charge you for another. The first bowl wasn’t valuable.

Done means something. A card that shipped with a defect injected during its own development didn’t earn it. The board says otherwise, but the work tells the truth.

Reopen it. Fix it. Move on.