Do you really want to know about the bugs that inhabits your bed?

I cannot say I'm crazy about documentaries that teaches me about the all the bugs that inhabit my living space. Sometime ignorance is bliss, right? But I hope our customers don't get too itchy about the fact that we're now publishing information about known bugs in our application. We recently reengineered most of our IT management processes and as a part of that the bug management process has now become much more transparent that earlier. For those of you interested, here's the answer to a few of the questions you might have:



Q: Do you publish all bugs?

No. There is a degree of editorial control to the bugs list. Only bugs actually verified by a developer/tester are published. Minor bugs are left out not to clutter the list. Security related bugs will also be left out of this list.


Q: Why can you not give us the actual date for when the bug is fixed?

Let's just say that software development and release management is a complicated process! The scope of a release is changed continuously during a development cycle and last minute testing can also affect the outcome of a release. Since new bugs reported potentially could reshuffle the priority of other bugs we feel that giving out an exact date is, well, dishonest. However, the status of a bug is a rough indicator of when you might expect a bug to be fixed.



Q: Can you explain what the different statues really means?

Approved: The bug has been confirmed by a developer/product manager and is put into the backlog of development work planned.

In progress: The bug has been assigned to a developer and most likely a fix would be released in one of the upcoming planned releases.

Ready for testing: The bug has been fixed by a developer but is awaiting QA/testing. Potentially this fix could be included in the next release but it might also be stopped in the QA process.

Fixed and verified: The bug is fixed in the version indicated by the field "Fixed in version". (Please note that even though the bug is fixed this particular version of it's learning might not have been released yet. The current version of it's learning is stated clearly on the login page, bottom left corner.)

Q: Why the heck do you make bugs in your application?!
Bugs are unfortunately a natural part of development and product lifecycle management. Denying it would just make things worse. Our job is to both minimize the number of bugs making it into our product and managing the ones that got through. Making our bug management process more transparent will hopefully make us better at that job.