How many open bugs do you have in the backlog? 100? 1000?
And how long do they lie there? A week? Month? Years?
Why is this happening? No time? Need to do more priority tasks? “Now we’ll implement all urgent features, and then there will definitely be time to rake bugs”?

... Some use the Zero Bug Policy, someone has a well-developed culture of working with bugs (update the backlog in a timely manner, review errors when changing functionality, etc.), and someone grows wizards who write without bugs at all (unlikely, but , maybe this happens).

Today I will tell you about our solution for cleaning the backlog of bugs - the “Bagelnya” project.

How did it all start?

Once again, looking at an ever-increasing backlog of open bugs, we reached the boiling point. It was impossible to live on like that, they decided to cut it at any cost. The idea is obvious, but how to do it? They agreed that the most effective way would be an event similar to a hackathon: tear teams from everyday tasks and allocate 1 working day to process only bugs.

They prescribed the rules, threw a cry and waited. There were fears that there would be few people willing, very few, but the result exceeded our expectations - as many as 8 teams signed up (though at the last moment 3 teams merged). The event was allocated a whole working day on Friday, booked a large meeting room. Lunches were organized on the basis of the office dining room, cookies were added for snacks.

Implementation

On the morning of day X, everyone was invited to a meeting room and a brief briefing was held.

Basic Rules:

• in one team, 2 to 5 people fight, at least one of them is QA;
• bugs should be closed by a member of the team according to all internal production standards;
• each team should have at least one closed bug requiring corrections in the code;
• You can only fix old bugs (date of creation of the bug <start date of the bagel - 1 month);
• points for corrected bugs (from 3 to 10) are awarded depending on the criticality (in order to avoid cheating, the criticality cannot be changed after the announcement of the date of the Bagel’s holding);
• for closing irrelevant, irreproducible bugs, 1 point is awarded;
• compliance with all the rules is monitored by the audit team, which will invalidate points for rediscovered bugs.

Other details

• We did not restrict anyone in choosing a location: you could stay in the workplace or sit with everyone in the meeting room, in which the guys were not distracted and there was a feeling of passion.

• To maintain the competitive spirit, a rating table was displayed on the big screen, and a text broadcast of the battle was constantly going on in the slack channel. To score points, we used a leaderboard, which was updated via webhooks.

Leaderboard

• Compliance with all the rules was monitored by the audit team (from experience, 1-2 people are enough for this).
• An hour after the end of the Bagel, double-checked results were announced.
  The winners received a gift certificate to the bar, and all participants received a souvenir (key rings with "bugs").

results

Over the past six months, we have already held three Bagels. What did we get in the end?

• The average number of teams is 5.
• The average number of processed bugs is 103.
• The average number of irrelevant / irreproducible bugs is 57% (but this garbage constantly corrupted the eyes and scared it with its quantity).

Results Announcement Moment

And now the answer to the most tricky question that everyone likes to ask: "How many new bugs have you planted?"
Answer: no more than 2% of all processed.

Reviews

After the Bagodelen, we collected feedback from the participants. Here are the answers to the question “What did you like most about the participation process?”:

• It’s very cool to disassemble a backlog with such motivation! Usually this is a very dull process, it must be done periodically).
• Excitement, cookies.
• This is a long-awaited opportunity to correct those little things that are not critical, but I want to edit.
• I liked that it is finally possible to fix old, unpleasant bugs outside the sprint, there will never be time for such, because there will always be tasks with a higher priority. We managed to gather all the right people in one place (dba was in our team, for example), we collectively discussed the relevance of the bugs and the technical ability to fix them.

Conclusion

A bagel is not a panacea, but it is a viable option to reduce the backlog of bugs (in different teams from 10 to 50%) in just one day. Our event took off only thanks to motivated guys who support the product and care about the happiness of our users.

All good and less bugs!