Finally, the Solution For a Bug Free Backlog(part 2)

Here’s a follow up to part 1 of this series.

We’ve decided to keep only these two types of issues in our backlog :

- New Feature
- Improvement.

A new feature can be either a new story or even something people might see as a “bug”.

The whole discussion stemmed from two broken links at the base of our Hibou webapp. We had 0 test for these. None.

They were added in a rush in the footer of our web page at the end of Codapalooza. And I mean really, how many people do you know who have written tests for a link towards your companies website and your team’s website.

Well guess what ? The only part of the whole app we did not test was broken as hell and nobody knew.

A quick reflex would have been to raise a bug, fix the bug and close the issue.

We had a discussion and tried to push things forward. Why didn’t we have a test for this ? What were we trying to accomplish by adding these two links ?

This got us thinking in a logical manner and we figured out that these two links were actually a feature.

We had added these link as a marketing feature in order to promote our team and company.

We then took the bug and wrote a story that looked a little like this :

As a marketer, I would like to see marketing of our organization and team throughout our website in order to promote our team.

Having a story, we can then sit down with our marketing buddy, fiund out what his real needs are and then develop the feature accordingly. All of this using TDD/BDD of course.

What do we use improvements for ? I’ll let you know in a little while.

-Nicholas Lemay