We’re constantly striving to add new features. Sometimes small, nagging bugs get lost in the shuffle of our week to week sprints. These aren’t show-stoppers by any means. They are small, rare exceptions from edge case usage, but they can create support cases and a bad experience for customers.
A few weeks ago, Dima suggested that we schedule “Bug Squash Mondays”. We would dedicate blocks of time where we would stop working on features and instead fix outstanding issues. We decided every other Monday would be a good rate to start out with. We could always pare that time down if we felt we weren’t dedicating enough time to new features.
After six weeks and three official Bug Squash Mondays, we’ve closed over 60 issues in Jira! Not all of these issues were huge impediments, but they were all causing problems in some small way. We all know that small problems can convert to backlog overhead and technical debt pretty quickly. Not having to worry about the corrected bugs anymore has reduced our support load and enabled us to spend more time focusing on features.
We’ll continue to focus on features for all three of our products. Delivering more value to our customers has always been one of our foremost goals. But taking a short break to fix outstanding issues once in awhile has been a huge payoff!