This is a guest blog by David Jellison of Constant Contact, the original post appears here. David will be sharing his story of scaling Kanban in the Enterprise at Atlassian Summit.
I recall a day in the late ’90′s when assessing readiness for deployment of an application at Kodak after a several month long release cycle having 3,000 deferred defects. WOW! I can’t believe that was acceptable at that time, but in long waterfall release cycles that was the norm at the time. How can you manage defects like this? Today, this is unacceptable. The idea of “deferred defects” has always bothered me in software development. So, what can we do about this?
Defect prevention, really? …is that possible? Imagine counting defects on your two hands.
Escaping defects should then be treated as ranked backlog work items, along with other project work items. They should be prioritized high enough to resolve them within the next sprint or two and not accumulate a growing backlog. Watch the defect backlog as part of the project metrics. A growing defect backlog is a key indicator that the team is taking on more new work than it can handle. It may also be a key indicator that the team is operating as a “mini-waterfall” project, rather than a agile project, requiring more collaboration between Dev and Quality Engineers and early testing. Drop the number of new items the team works on until the escaping defects are well managed or eliminated.
When a WIP Defect must exist past the completion of the parent development task, then promote it to a Defect and place it in the backlog in rank order with other work. However, whenever possible the team should heavily scrutinize this practice and opt to hold delivery of the feature until the WIP Defects are complete. Also, a Defect in the backlog could be demoted and attached to an active development task to include it in the acceptance criteria for that task.
At Constant Contact, we now have our defects in the same tool (Jira/GreenHopper) that we manage new feature work, such that defects are in the same project and iteration backlogs. This provides greater visibility to the product owner ranking the work and the team implementing the work.
Constant Contact embraces continuous improvement and innovation. If you want to help Constant Contact deliver industry leading software with minimal defects take a look at their openings in MA, NY, and CA.
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