We've moved our group's workflow to a scrum-based approach, with a lot of success. We're getting things done, people are more engaged, and we're more focused on our actual user community's needs.
Because we needed to work on processes over tools, we're using physical cards on a backlog board and a task board. This works pretty well, although we're probably going to move to an electronic version eventually as we're starting to get more remote team members.
This works very well for "right sized" user stories. But how do we deal with things that are really too small for a user story? Sometimes these are bugs/defects, or sometimes they're just really small feature requests or enhancements. For example, our Gitorious installation appends a superfluous s to repository names when one makes a clone. It'd be nicer if it didn't.
One could write user stories for every thing like this (which is what we do), but a) it feels overweight and not at all "agile" and b) such stories inevitably get scheduled below bigger, more important things, even though they're often low-hanging fruit (small effort for small but noticeable results).
Or, one could have a separate issue tracker. However, that suddenly goes from one place to look for work — the scrum task board — to having two tools. Is there a good way to integrate these things so they don't act in opposition to each other?
Or, one could just leave these things out of the process and shout them at each other across the room. There's a serious risk of this becoming the de facto process if I don't fix this. When this works, it's basically fine, but it's problematic because a) it can disrupt productivity when people get distracted from their other work by unscheduled interruptions and b) when these issues aren't immediately fixed, they can (as the question title) get dropped.
