Get into the habit of fixing bugs immediately.

At first, it may slow you down a little. In the long term, the effect is higher quality and a team that is more confident to add more new features.

Do not

• Put bugs in the backlog so you can ”look at them later”. All those soon-to-looked-at bugs clutter the backlog, add cognitive load to the whole team and make planning sessions take more time than necessary.
• Mix bugs and feature requests. In many cases, stakeholders don’t know the difference and file everything as critical bugs.
• Keep soon-to-looked-at bugs in the backlog forever. Try to simply throw away everything in the backlog that is older than 5–7 sprints.

Do

• Create a simple definition of Critical Bug. In many projects I have used something along the lines of When the user cannot complete a task, which is supported, and there is no simple work around.
• Give the Team the mandate to always prioritize bugs to the top of the backlog (this is the Zero-Bug policy).