How many open bugs do you have in your backlog? 100? 1000?
And how long do they lie there? a week? Month? Years?
And why is this happening? No time? Need to do higher priority tasks? “Now we are implementing all the urgent features, and then there will definitely be time to sort out bugs”?

… Some use the Zero Bug Policy, some have a well-developed culture of working with bugs (they update the backlog in a timely manner, review bugs when functionality changes, etc.), and some grow magicians who write without bugs at all (unlikely, but maybe it happens).

Today I will tell you about our solution for cleaning the bug backlog - the Baghouse project.

How did it start?

Once again, looking through the ever-increasing backlog of open bugs, we reached a boiling point. It was impossible to live like this any longer, they decided to reduce it at any cost. The idea is obvious, but how to do it? We agreed that the most effective way would be an event similar to a hackathon: to tear teams away from everyday tasks and set aside 1 working day for processing only bugs.

They wrote down the rules, threw a cry and began to wait. There were fears that there would be few applicants, very few, but the result exceeded our expectations - as many as 8 teams signed up (although at the last moment 3 merged). They allotted a whole working day for the event on Friday, booked a big meeting. Lunches were organized on the basis of the office canteen, cookies were added for snacks.

implementation

On the morning of X day, everyone gathered in a meeting room and held a brief briefing.

Basic rules:

• one team fights from 2 to 5 people, at least one of them is QA;
• bugs must be closed by a team member according to all internal production standards;
• each team must have at least one closed bug that requires fixes in the code;
• Only old bugs can be fixed (the date of creation of the bug < the start date of the almshouse is 1 month);
• for fixed bugs, points (from 3 to 10) are awarded depending on the criticality (to avoid cheating, you cannot change the criticality after the announcement of the date of the Pampering House);
• for closing irrelevant, irreproducible bugs, 1 point is awarded;
• compliance with all rules is monitored by the audit team, which cancels points for rediscovered bugs.

Other details

• We did not limit anyone in the choice of location: it was possible to stay at the workplace or sit with everyone in a meeting room, in which the guys were not distracted and passions were felt.

• To maintain the competitive spirit, a rating table was displayed on the big screen, and a text broadcast of the battle was constantly broadcast in the slack channel. To calculate the points, we used a leaderboard that was updated via webhooks.

Leaderboard

• Compliance with all the rules was monitored by the audit team (according to experience, 1-2 people are enough for this).
• An hour after the end of the Bagodelny, the rechecked results were announced.
  The winners received a gift certificate to the bar, and all participants received a souvenir (key chains with "bugs").

The results

Over the past six months, we have already held three Bagodelni. What did we end up with?

• The average number of teams is 5.
• The average number of processed bugs is 103.
• The average number of irrelevant / irreproducible bugs is 57% (and this garbage constantly an eyesore and frightened with its quantity).

Moment of announcement of results

And now the answer to the most tricky question that everyone loves to ask: “How many new bugs have you planted?”.
Answer: no more than 2% of all processed.

Reviews

After the Bagodelen, we collected feedback from the participants. Here are the answers to the question “What did you like most about the participation process?”:

• It’s very cool to sort out the backlog with such motivation! Usually this is a very dull process, you need to do this periodically).
• Excitement, cookies.
• This is a long-awaited opportunity to correct those little things that are not critical, but you want to edit.
• I liked that you can finally fix old, unpleasant bugs outside the sprint, there will never be time for such ones, because there will always be tasks with a higher priority. We managed to gather all the necessary people in one place (our team had a dba, for example), collectively discussed the relevance of the bugs and the technical possibility of fixing them.

Conclusion

The baghouse is not a panacea, but it is a viable option to reduce the bug backlog (in different teams from 10 to 50%) in just one day. For us, this event took off only thanks to motivated guys who support the product and care about the happiness of our users.

All the best and fewer bugs!

Source: habr.com