Three years ago we closed our old Jira database because it was overflowing with over 1600 bugs and issues and improvements. We had nobody who treated this database as his baby and consequently everybody just dumped stuff into it. Development was regularly critized for not acting on all those requests. For some reason the expectation had been created that this was some sort of queue and eventually everything droped into it would be worked on.

Timo then stepped up, started fresh and has been owning our bug count ever since. He constantly kept an eye on the list and made sure we never were over two to three hundred. Also he regularly interfaced with everybody else in the company to get their priorities as to which issues should be worked on first. But overall the count kept increasing slowly.

Over one year ago we then initiated a policy that we would fix all (really ALL) bugs that we introduced with one release in the two to three days after the release (remember we release roughly every two weeks). These “post release defects” are tracked by Ron on a Google spreadsheet that we have displayed during those days on one of our 42 inch LCD monitors we have mounted in our office. Open bugs are red, fixed bugs are green. Pretty soon, it became a tradition to “go for green” in-between your normal work on stories in the days after any release.

Of course we are increasing our test coverage to make sure we don’t have any post release defects. But we make sure that no new bugs get on our list. As a result, our accumulated bug count has been decreasing pretty steadily and most of the remaining bugs are almost trivial – we will fix them nonetheless.

As a result customer satisfaction has increased noticeably and we have lots of breathing space to do new stuff. We are not weighted down by “bug-debt”.  So, don’t put bugs into a queue but work on them LIFO.