Bugs management :
How we delight our external and internal customers with rapid response time
We have a dedicated company Slack channel available for the whole Seraphin team to report bugs (either bugs encountered by our users, or bugs encountered by the team while working in the back-office softwares).
We try to educate our colleagues to best extent on how to create good bug reports, and we should always strive to remind them with these guidelines about what a good bug report in Slack should contain:
- Criticality (high/medium/low)
- Who is facing the bug (myself/a user)
- Context of the bug (what was I trying to achieve, what happened instead)
- Screenshot if available
- URL of the buggy page if available
Ultimately these elements serve the purpose of performing a very first instinctive assessment of the severity of the bug, and then to reproduce it.
Furthermore, we try to enforce the following good practices in the channel:
- No discussion on topics other than bugs
- No new messages to respond to an existing message: use the reply feature instead
- Try to avoid features suggestions and focus on real bugs/errors
- Avoid "how-to" questions when you think you could ask a peer directly
Once a bug has entered the Slack channel, the following process takes place:
- The day's owner (see below) routes the bug according to its emergency, how easy it is to solve etc (that is, sometimes a bug simply relates to a misunderstanding that can be corrected with explanations, sometimes a bug has already been reported before, sometimes it is not even worth solving...)
- If it requires fixing with code, then the day's owner creates a Trello card labelled as "Bug", "Unexpected", and copy-pastes the bug description in the card, along with the link to the Slack message reporting the bug. The column will be either CURRENT SPRINT for urgent bugs, or PRIORITIZED for things that can wait. These latter bugs should not be flagged with the unexpected label
- Only then, the day's owner marks the bug as seen with the eye emoji (👁️, as a reaction to the initial message)
- After the bug has been handled by a team member and deployed to production, it is the responsibility of the tech team member that fixed the bug to flag it so with a green check mark (✅), and potentially tag the reporting team member with her handle in the Slack channel