I did a lightning talk at the Roots conference back in April titled “The simplest solution to bug tracking: don’t!”. The 6 minute talk is now online at Vimeo.com together with the other lighting talks at Roots.
I’ve always tried to avoid bug tracking tools and have several times deleted the entire content in such tools (reported bugs) to great success. However, that’s not what I want to talk about here, but if this sounds weird to you go check out Gojko’s post on the subject.
What I want to talk about here is one issue that came up during my team’s retrospective meeting on Friday. One of the improvement points that came up was bugs. Not that there where too many or that we should find more, but that some bugs where fixed and then reappeared as bugs again on a later stage. The suggested solution was: Instead of having the tester pull the buggy story from test and back into dev, he would write a test (integration or unit) that would replicate the bug and check it into source control.
Since we’re doing Kanban, what would the effect of the above action be? It will effectively stop the “assembly line”. In practice CI will report a failing test and the team will stop what they are doing to fix the failing test.
This is of course something we’ll adopt for all bugs, not just bugs that gets reported twice. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out all the benefits (and drawbacks if any) as well as why this solves our problem at hand. I’m looking forward to see how this will work out in practice.
