Why I don’t use bug tracking

software….Neil Johnson

Working environment

• Software as a Service

• Services sold on their reliability and availability

• Industry is still very young, continual innovation is essential

• Teams are cross functional

• All members responsible for design, implementation, deployment and maintenance

• Easy access to Product Development/Business

Our Righteous Agile Credentials

TDD

Pair Programming

Kanban

Effective Continuous Integration

Continuous Deployment to Staging (almost….)

Big information radiators

Daily stand ups

On finding a bug

• Fix it immediately

• Fix it in the near future

• Add it to a list and plan to fix it at some point

• Ignore it

So what does this mean?

• We take minor bugs much more seriously

• Forces us to fix bugs as we go

• Place greater emphasis on not introducing them in the first place

• We work hard on black box testing so that fixed, unrecorded bugs cannot return

Why does this work for us?

• Well specified APIs, no GUIs

• Have good access to those specifying the product

• Have good visibility over bug discovery

• Manageable rate of bug discovery

• Have the freedom toprioritisebugs over scheduled project work

• Run a system that lends itself to system testing

• Assume most bugs can be fixed in a few days

• Continuity within the team

This talk is not about bug tracking software

This talk is about continuous process improvement

Agile and Lean teams continually inspect and adapt their process. No

aspect of that process should be considered safe.

Get in touch

• neil@fragile.org.uk

• http://fragile.org.uk/2010/04/why-i-dont-use-bug-tracking-software/

• @neilisfragile