Thursday, April 19, 2018

Where Are Your Bug Reports?

Yesterday, I put together a group of nine testers to do some mob testing. We had a great time, came out a shared understanding, people's weak ideas amplified and people standing together in knowing how we feel about the functionality and quality, and value for users.

This morning, I had a project management ping: "There are no bug reports in Jira, did you test yesterday?".

Later today, another manager reminds over email: "Please, report any identified bugs in Jira or give a list to N.N. It's very hard to react/improve on 'loads of bugs' statement without concrete examples.". They then went on informing me that when the other testers run a testing dojo, they did that on a Jira ticket and reported everything as subtasks and hinted I might be worried about duplicates.

I can't help but smile on the ideas this brings out. I'm not worried about duplicates. I'm worried about noise in the numbers. I have three important messages, and writing 300 bugs to make that point is a lot of work and useless noise. This is not a service I provide.

Instead I offered to work temporarily as system tester for the system in question with two conditions:
  1. I will not write a single bug report in Jira, but get the issues fixed in collaboration with developers across the teams. 
  2. Every single project member pair tests with me for an hour with focus on their changes in the system context. 
Jury is still out on my conditions. I could help, but I can't help within the system that creates so much waste.  I need a system that improves the impact of the feedback I have to give through deep exploratory testing, focused on value.

I'd rather be anything but a mindless drone logging issues in Jira. How about you?