Down with Bugs

No offense to the entomologists among you, but when it comes to software, we don’t want bugs – the glitches in code that make the software do strange things. The second sprint of ZIMS has just finished testing and it now heads into the eleven days of fixing the bugs that our testing team found last week. The good news: our testers found that Sprint 2 had about half as many bugs as Sprint 1. That means that the development process is – as we had projected – getting smarter with each sprint. With each sprint, the development team builds increasing understanding of the process, and communicates better with one another.

This good news also helps mitigate one of the larger risks in any software development process – the danger that unfixed bugs will accumulate over time until they become a mountain of defects that can no longer be fixed in a reasonable time. We’ve lived that story once and we know it does not end well. So far, it looks like the new development process is managing this risk very well, in the ways we had planned.

(This may be apocryphal, but the story goes that the expression “bug” actually came from a problem IBM was having with its punch-card computers: apparently real insects had gotten into the mechanism.)