Theming Issues
So often engineering teams have “feature” work to focus on. Bugs are this separate thing to deal with. Bug counts can vary based on product age, usage, etc. No matter how many you have, you still have options how to address them.
In an ideal world teams would have the time to fix all the issues right away. But in reality sometimes they pile up. It can take a lot of context switching and effort to dive deep enough into an area to fix an issue and then start all over again.
For the time benefit alone, I recommend theming issues and working on related issues at the same time.
However, one you do that, you can get even better outcomes. Specifically when you group like bugs together it can give you a more complete picture of the issue and often a more comprehensive approach to solve the root of the problem.
It quickly goes from “this customer had a problem with x” to “this is a confusing area and we need better samples.”
The approach doesn’t have to be complicated. One example way to approach it:
- Have a bug (assigned to you, oldest, highest pri,…however you would already)
- Search through your bug system for key related words
- Read them all before starting to fix any
- Unblock folks
- Look use the info to identify if there are more systematic fixes to make
In some cases the fix really is a change to the product. Sometimes updating documentation or writing a blog post can help.
Really the only way to know what would be helpful is to dive in and try it out. If nothing else, it will save you some time of diving into an area and refreshing it once instead of spreading those same issues out for everyone to spend half the time thinking about the space.
Curious what others think. Do you already do something like this?
