Bug Scrubbing
If you work in an agile development environment, chances are your Project Manager spends a lot of time reviewing, triaging, and re-assigning your QA team’s bug tickets. If your customers are submitting tickets as well, chances are your PM is spending even more of their valuable time scrubbing those issues.
At Shasta QA, we recognize the challenges that face a project when dealing with high volumes of tickets. On a large scale project with monthly numbers of tickets that range well into the hundreds, Project Managers can spend a substantial amount of time scrubbing tickets to determine where to assign a ticket or whether or not something is even a bug to begin with.
The Challenges
When you’ve got your customers submitting tickets, in addition to your QA and Development teams, things can get out of hand or overwhelming for a single PM. Your customers might not be as familiar with your software as they think they are, filing tickets that will be resolved as Expected Behavior; they might be dealing with improperly configured software, filing tickets that will be resolved as Won’t Fix. Your PM’s time is valuable, and that valuable time is at risk of being lost vetting tickets that won’t ever result in a bug fix or improvement.
Our Approach
One approach we’ve seen work well in this kind of scenario is to offload the bug scrubbing duties from the PM onto QA. Chances are you’ve got the best product experts you’ll ever have, right there on your QA team. Often times, tickets will get kicked to the product experts in QA at some point anyhow, whether it’s for verification of expected behavior, or to investigate reproducibility.
The tickets tend to get kicked there from all angles as well - from the PM to QA, from the Dev team to QA, and even from tech support to QA. What we’ve successfully done when it’s made sense is to insert our QA as a sort of intermediary between our clients and their customers to offload some of that bug scrubbing and give the PM less to have to look at, freeing up some precious PM time to address other tasks.