It all started when I asked for feedback at the Agile practitioners IL 2016 conference.
There was one lecture that stood out, and every person I talked to said it was the best lecture of the day.
0 Bugs policy by Gal Zellermayer, a Development manager from VMWare.
I had to see what it was all about, so I asked some of my Scrum Masters what they thought of the lecture.
Some said that the 0 Bugs Policy is something we have to start doing today, some said their teams are already practicing something similar. All of them agreed it would be great if we could have this lecture @SAP to expose as many people as possible to this concept and push it forward.
It happened that I bumped into Gal a few weeks later at another Agile event, and I used the opportunity to ask him if he would be willing to come over to SAP Labs IL to present his concept, and he was more than happy to do so.
The lecture took place on 28/3 and was attended by about 80 people from cross lab units.
So what is 0 Bugs policy all about?
In a nut shell, it is very simple.
We have all experienced the situation where a bug is ranked high in the sprint backlog but it keeps being pushed down since there are other new features that are more urgent or important. Eventually, we have bugs laying around in our system that has been there for months.
Meanwhile, the functionality has changed, new features were introduced, and people in the teams changed.
The chance that we will get to solve these bugs is close to none.
So why wait? Why postpone it to another time?
There will always be another feature just around the corner…
When you find a bug, you either fix it, or you close it.
Well, it is not that simple, is it?
According to Gal, being explicit about this policy has led to a culture change in his teams that raised the level of quality of the product. This means that you do open bugs. Yes, even lows. But then the PO and the team need to make a decision: do we invest time in solving it or is it not important enough and then we close it.
All about how they got to the conclusion this is the only way and how they implemented it can be found in Gal's slides
Hope to see you in our next Eco-System event,
Naama
