So Happy.

I don’t do this very often but I am going to brag a little bit.  Applying the engineering practices I have been talking about in this blog is showing huge results.  My current team owns the most fundamental pieces of our product yet our issue (bug) count only represents %4 of the overall bug rate across the organization…and we could do even better.  Due to the confidentiality of the project that is about all I can say but there are so many other interesting tidbits I could call out.  We have done this with several simple principles.

  1. Everyone owns quality on the team – and better yet believes in it
  2. We have a comprehensive suite of test collateral that we run everyday across 3 platforms
  3. We triage everyday and only keep the bugs we are going to fix (we only have a small ripple that moves forward | not a growing wave)
  4. We have a comprehensive yet developer workflow friendly check in process that catches most problems
  5. We have a customer focused validation process that ensures our customers are happy
  6. Essentially every engineer owns product code but we have certain engineers who are test specialists that have the tester gene and use it to make the product and other team members better

You will notice a couple of things missing although temporarily.  We are still working on a plan for addressing verticals (Performance, Stress, Localization, etc.).  We are already covering a lot of this surface area through current work items but we need a more formal plan.  You will also see telemetry missing.  Although we believe in telemetry and instrumentation we will be very selective in what we collect in production and this will take time.  We have a plan for a plan and will be implementing it in the coming sprints.  More than anything it will be to empower data collection at higher levels to have the correlation of data points in our code to help answer questions at a product and customer experience level.

I think the most important aspect of this post is that nothing is really different from what I have done in the past other than the fact that we are operating as one single engineering team.  The execution deltas between each engineer on the team is super thin.  It doesn’t hurt that my Dev and PM peers are crazy amazing and supportive.