Bugs can be tricky, just like a good riddle… sometimes a developer can spend day after day working on a specific bug, trying various approaches with no success, getting extremely frustrated. And then someone else with a fresh set of eyes will come into the room and immediately find the solution, just like in a good riddle.
This is why here in SharedBook, we put special emphasis on team work and team effort when it comes to bugs. We have learned, that like solving riddles, fixing bugs can be challenging, exciting and even satisfying, or it can be the most boring, frustrating task in the world.
Every once in a while, we take one week where everyone in R&D works solely on fixing bugs (well, almost everyone, in the real world, with clients and deadlines, some people can not be spared). We even have a special terminology for this: blitz, named after the famous WWII Blitz. This is a time where we create a huge, massive, concentrated bombing of the bugs.
You can feel special energy and vibes in the air during a blitz. People are working together, tackling problems in pairs, using this as an opportunity to learn and get to know unknown territories in our code base. As a manager, it is always exciting to see this process from the side. How it picks up momentum, and while at first it seems as if nothing is getting done, suddenly, dozens and dozens of problems we have been carrying around – are solved. The magic of good team work comes to play again.
And of course, in the eye of the storm we have our QA people. Working hard to support our developers, test the system again and again. Oren, our QA manager, who is orchestrating this process will probably share this experience with us in one of his next blog posts.
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