In previous posts (bug ageing and processes), I have been talking about the importance of bug ageing, and in the previous post, I talked about some of the reasons for tracking bug ageing and ensuring that bugs do not delayed in terms of when they are finally seen by the development team. In this post, I will talk about more reasons for ensuring that bug ageing is critical to monitor for the team:
– Morale. We have found that it makes a lot of difference to the overall morale of the team, and specifically of the QE members of the team. Consider the case where a member of the team does his / her job, finds bugs and like anybody else, expects that those bugs will be seen. However, when a number of bugs are not seen for many weeks or months, the QE starts feeling dispirited. In one particularly bad episode, we had a situation where as many as 30% of the bugs were only getting looked at after around a month. The QE manager was finding it hard to control issues of morale where the QE team started feeling that their work was unimportant, and even regular assurances were not making any difference. You have a happy team and good team dynamics when team members feel valued and feel that whatever work they are doing is respected.
– Attrition and bugs devolving on other QE: We felt this most critically in a couple of cases, at a time when attrition rates had gone up. In such times, for some critical bugs, by the time that the Dev team members had started looking at the bugs, they found that the QE who had filed them had actually moved off the team, and the time it took to resolve these bugs was at least double the time it would have taken if the original tester had been looking at the bugs, rather than somebody else who had to go by the steps and assume that whatever was written was the correct sequence in trying to reproduce the defect. This problem has led to bugs not being found again when they were attempted to be reproduced.
Based on the factors described in this post and in the previous posts, it should be clear that bug aging is an important factor that any development team should take into account as part of their bug tracking processes.
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