Thursday 

Room 7 

09:00 - 10:00 

(UTC+02

Talk (60 min)

Zero-bug policy success

Zero-bug policies are usually controversial, misunderstood, or both. Meanwhile, you probably live with a backlog of open bugs that you don’t expect to resolve any time soon.

Agile
People

But you could. Zero-bug policies matter, because swarms of unfixed bugs waste time, hurt team morale, cause soul-destroying meetings, make development slow and unpredictable, and destroy customer trust.

This experience report from a Norwegian start-up in 2024 describes the journey from firefighting daily bug reports, to fixing the last open bug, and the joy of development with zero open bugs. Attendees will learn about the practical side of implementing a zero-bug policy, from introducing the idea, to achieving its goals. Our story includes the team dynamics of agreeing to give it a try, the objections and risks, and other implementation challenges. You’ll learn about why it’s worth the effort to fix (almost) all of the bugs, and which ones you can ignore.

Peter Hilton

Peter Hilton is a product manager, developer, writer, speaker, trainer, and musician. Peter’s professional interests are no-code automation, software functional design, and software documentation. Peter consults for software companies and development teams, and delivers the occasional presentation and workshop. Peter has previously presented at numerous European developer conferences, contributed to ‘97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know’ (O’Reilly), co-authored ‘Play for Scala’ (Manning), and taught training courses including his own on ‘How to write maintainable code’.