What is a bug?
What is a high-priority bug?
What’s a low-priority bug?
“Is this really a bug—or just a feature?”
Or perhaps a misunderstanding?
“Ah… the requirements were wrong!“
This and similar conversations happen a lot in organizations. And organizations can spend an enormous amount of time debating these questions.
Time that could instead be used for collaboration and value creation.
A Real-World Example
In one organization I had the chance to work with, I observed endless discussions about bug classification. Hours spent in meetings, Jira tickets constantly changing status—High, then Medium, then back again.
Through conversations and a deeper dive, it turned out the Product Owner had a specific target in his annual goals: his product was allowed to have no more than one high-priority bug per Quarter.
If there were more, his bonus would be reduced. And a bonus means $$$.
The consequence? Behavior that didn’t exactly foster collaboration.
Bugs were downgraded in priority or shifted to other teams
–> The Product Owner would do anything to avoid showing up bugs in “his” product.
The Actual Org Smell
The problem wasn’t the bugs themselves but the management practice: individual performance targets that created perverse incentives.
Wanting bug-free software is, of course, a great goal.
But once you tie individual bonuses to it, you inevitably get unhealthy behaviors aka Org Smells.
How Do We Treat Quality?
What makes bugs interesting is how much they reveal about an organization’s culture:
- How do teams learn from mistakes?
- Do we perform root cause analyses? (Proper Root Cause Analysis?)
- What monitoring do we have in place?
- How do we prevent similar issues from happening again?
- How do we share learnings across teams?
These are the kinds of questions that really shape how we treat quality.
An open question for you
In this case, the individual performance goal was eventually dropped.
👉🏽 How would you handle the management practice of linking individual goals to the number of bugs?
👉🏽 What alternative approaches would you suggest?
What To Learn More About Org Smells?
Find out more by reading about Organizational Smells, and a How To Find Them here.