Bugs that nobody has noticed (yet)

Agile Quality

Dmitry Avdeev Co-founder, CPO| LingoPraxis Tbilisi, Georgia

Hi all, I develop software for corporate clients. In our current project, we have many bug reports from our clients and spend a lot of time fixing them. At the same time, we find many bugs by ourselves. We prioritize bugs found by clients higher than the bugs found by us, therefore bugs found by clients we call major bugs, and the bugs found by us we call minor bugs. In most cases, minor bugs just reside in the backlog and probably will never be fixed, because all the time there is something more important than a bug that no client has noticed, often in a very long time.

Most likely it means that our clients don't use everything that we have, or maybe they don't want to report every issue they see.

Recently I tried to get the actual numbers and found that it was even less than 5% of those minor bugs that would be reported by a client later.

Relying on that number I can simply throw all the backlog of minor bugs away because there is no need to work on something that is not noticed by clients anyway.

Nevertheless, my gut feeling is that this situation might be a symptom of something bad. And why throw away the actual information that something doesn't work correctly.

I wonder what other people's opinions on this. How important is it to fix all the known bugs? And what may be the percentage of the issues that customers don't report?

Posted: Oct 5, 2022 4:02 AM

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Latha Thamma reddi Sr Product and Portfolio Management (Automation Innovation)| DXC Technology Mckinney, Tx, United States

Oct 05, 2022 8:53 AM

Replying to Kiron Bondale

...

Dmitry -

In general, defects identified and resolved internally will cost less than those which a customer reports. Even if a customer doesn't report a "minor" bug, they might be aware of it, and it might impact their perception of the product's quality.

Rather than spending effort fixing bugs, I'd suggest shifting quality left and focus on preventing them using quality design & development practices.

Kiron

I too agree

Posted: Apr 12, 2023 4:25 PM

Latha Thamma reddi Sr Product and Portfolio Management (Automation Innovation)| DXC Technology Mckinney, Tx, United States

Good question and answers

Posted: Apr 12, 2023 4:26 PM

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Bugs that nobody has noticed (yet)

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