What’s Our Aggravated Defect Backlog Sitting At?

At the beginning of our weekly development status meeting last Wednesday, Brian, our Release Manager, got on his soapbox and was fussing about the defect backlog to the various Scrum Masters. He was clearly agitated and was establishing a pretty stern tone ( stern at least from the perspective of software engineers anyways – it is all relative).

Brian was threatening that we would stop new Story development and institute daily mandatory 8:00 Eastern Time Defect Management meetings for all the Scrum Masters if the backlog didn’t get some focus. Fair enough – I had no issue with what he was saying – but you generally don’t hear that sort of tone, so the atmosphere in the room was a little tense.

I was sitting in the “Heather Spot” in the Conference Room next to one of our Test Leads, Gary. The Heather Spot is this location at the end of the conference table where one of our former colleagues insisted on sitting at the Wednesday status meeting.

After the little diatribe last Wednesday, Brian looked at Gary and said: “Now I’d like to get an aggravated view of the defects from Gary.” Of course, Brian meant to say aggregated. I almost burst out laughing and it definitely broke the tension a bit.

Gary is one of my favorite colleagues at work. In addition to being one of the best testers I have ever worked with, he has this dry sense of humor. A couple of years ago, he was given this assignment of being the primary tester of the Upgrade Support in our product. Upgrade is the process of moving the product from an earlier version to the current version. In our product, at that time, the Upgrade Support was buggy as hell, poorly documented, and just a mess. So Gary was finding a boatload of defects, which is what testers are paid to do.

When a ton of defects are opened in a particular component of the product, it is an unfortunate fact of human nature that the Development Team that owns that component gets a little sensitive and sometimes will lash back out at the tester finding all the defects. This sometimes takes the form of challenging how the tester is testing the product and whether the tester is using the product documentation and features correctly.  So during this stretch when he was testing the Upgrade Support, Gary was getting challenged. It really is a case of Don’t Shoot the Messenger, so I totally sympathized with him at the time. During one online chat session with Gary during this period, he confided in me:

I feel like I am trapped in this never-ending episode of a new game show entitled “Are You Smarter Than an Upgrader?”

I spit water on my ThinkPad.