Tea-Driven Development

How many unresolved bugs are there in your system right now?

Yes, yes, smarty-pants: the ones you already know about.

Ten? Fifty? Two hundred? More?!

I find it frighteningly common to see teams let a huge backlog of bugs build up. They set up a trusted system like Jira or Bugzilla and then use it as a dumping bucket for a whole variety of irritations, glitches, missing features, and genuine defects.

Pretty soon the list becomes un-managably large. Nobody dares go in there, because it’s full of bad news. This drains the team’s energy and morale.

Getting on top of, and staying on top of your bug list is hugely important, and I outline my thoughts and experiences on achieving that below.

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I facilitated our regular end-of-iteration retrospective last week, and although the feedback from the team was positive, I was left with a feeling that something wasn’t right.

With our second major live release looming large on the horizon, I focussed the session on the theme of ‘Success’. My aim was to give the team a blueprint for a successful iteration to keep in mind when things were tough, and to help ensure that we were all pulling in the same direction by agreeing as a team what constitutes success for us.

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