In scrum, how do you account for helping and solving other developers' tickets?

Question

Another developer has a 3 point bug which he has spent a few days on. He reached out to me for help via video call and in about an hour I solved part of his bug with actual code, and the another part with pseudo code. How do I account for this work?

1. Do I just let him have the ticket? On paper it looks like he did the work, so this will result in inaccurate metrics on the productivity of the developers.
2. Do I create a "Help" type of ticket, credit it to me, score it as a 1 pointer, and link it to his ticket?
3. Do I split his ticket into two? He gets 1 point and I get 2 or something like that?
4. Do I completely take over his ticket and just finish it off? Also, he doesn't want to give up his ticket because he already spent a few days on it and won't get credit if this is the case.

Answer 1

Good question, this scenario usually happens with everyone. And no one want's their efforts to be unnoticed!

If you are using JIRA as your ticketing platform then you can create a subtask of your main ticket and attach to it if the main's
ticket work was yours's part work officially. Because a sub-task is
also a type of ticket. And this will directly catch one's attention
on opening main ticket, that the main ticket has a sub-task. You can
then log your time in the work-log TAB of the main ticket. So as to
indicate the time you have given on this ticket.

Other plaforms such as ServiceNow might have such feature, but I exacly don't know about that too much!

Answer 2

This question sparked more questions for me. In Scrum, velocity is for the team rather than the individual developer. I have a few suggestions:

1. Depending on your ticketing system, always comment on the ticket when you support another team member.
2. If your system allows, suggest that a new custom multi-user field is added to the tickets (you can do this in Jira) with a meaningful label like "developer." This will allow you to add your name to tickets that you support.
3. Hopefully, you are doing a daily stand-up. When you give your status, tell the team you supported a ticket. This may not be an option if you are external to the team.
4. Use the suggestion to create subtasks if you can.
5. Keep a log of the work you support to add as part of your accomplishments, for your scheduled management reviews.

Answer 3

I would say that you should just let the other developer have the ticket, especially since you said it only cost you an hour. They are the one that has spent the majority of the time on the ticket.

It's important to remember that in agile development the goal is to provide working code, not generate metrics. This won't skew the metrics by any significant amount.