Bugs for Breakfast

People often say that quality is essential to the success of Agile teams. But really, they mean that quality is essential in any long running team and we choose to focus on it in Agile teams. But how do you keep quality top of mind? How do you make sure quality issues aren’t being ignored or down prioritised?

You eat Bugs for Breakfast!

We of course want to be moving towards defect free environments and making sure that quality is simply built in, but many teams are not there yet. Bugs for breakfast is built to help along that journey to the defect free utopia we dream of.

Bugs for breakfast is a meeting where the team spends some time together eating breakfast and socialising, but this time is also used to increase our quality focus. During this meeting we take some time to examine whatever indicators of quality we have in the team; this could be error logs from the servers, bug reports from customers, defects found by testers, our issue tracker, or what have you. We then try to find trends and groupings of issues so we can plan to take a bite out of whatever the biggest ones are.

You can then plan to take these things back to your Sprint, make them highest priority on your Kanban board, or simply sit as a team and address some of them right there in the room. The important part here is that you not only look at the quality issues, but use this as a platform to do something about them.

Eventually when your breakfasts have had a big enough impact, the jump to zero defects is a much simpler one. And when people people ask you how it is that you have no bugs you can say:

“Bugs!?! My team eats bugs for breakfast!”

Tips

• Start with an interval of one hour, once a week.
• Have issues printed or on Post-its, instead of in a bug tracker to make grouping a more engaging activity.
• If your company won’t pay for the breakfast, just ask each team member to contribute a small amount to make it happen.
• If you’re a Scrum Master, make this really easy for your team by sorting the breakfast aspect for them.
• Look for things to resolve that have a good ROI, so you get more time to address the next thing.