When the bugs bite

Are your bugs really an error of coding or a failure of set-up?

At the point in product development, when your product reaches QA, life as a delivery manager can be overwhelming. JIRA tickets fly into your inbox and you struggle to get a grasp on everything that’s ‘going wrong’ with the product.

Why didn’t the development team do it right in the first place? Why is QA picking up on insignificant details? Why is this all happening so late in the development cycle?

So you squish some of the important bugs and hand the product over to the client. Then they mail-bomb — who proceeds to fire each issue in a single email chain — sending your inbox spiralling out of control! And each one, of course, is a high priority!

Thankfully these instances are rare because as a DM you’ve set up controlled procedures to cover such eventualities. Right?

Yeah, maybe not.

Let’s go back to the basics by considering what a bug is?

A bug is an error, flaw, failure, or fault that causes the product to produce an incorrect or unexpected result, or to behave in unintended ways.

The chances are that handling ‘bugs’ is where you’ll start your career as a delivery manager, prioritising by severity, client demand, availability of skills, QA throughput, time required and cost.

How can you avoid the flurry of post-QA tickets? If you’ve done the user stories, examples and set-up well, the tickets will be true bugs, that is, true errors of coding or the unforeseen consequences of coding because you can’t predict every permutation. If you haven’t set up thoroughly then the so-called bugs will include misinterpretations of expected behaviour.

That’s cold comfort if the bugs are biting you now, especially if you’ve inherited a ‘problem’ project. But don’t despair. Take specific note of things that aren’t true bugs but rather are lapses in set-up that could have been eliminated by more time spent planning up-front.

Use this experience to learn how to set up the next project. It’s how all delivery managers learn. Books, blogs and training courses have their place, but nothing can replace the experience of fighting your way through a forest of bugs.

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