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New: Bug Pain Plugin - No Pains!


We’ve got an interesting new tool in TargetProcess 2.18.1 — Bug Pain plugin. It emerged from our own “bug pains”  to empower decision making for QA team as they pull some bug to fix, with no Product Owner involved.

Disclaimer: QA Team are aware of product development strategy, they just needed some help with bugs prioritization when Product Owner is not available to talk.

Bug Pain value in TargetProcess depends on “Severity, “Visibility” and “Class” values as below:

bug-pain-severity-visibility

“Severity” indicates bug severity per se. This could be some grave error that ruins the whole release or a small UX flaw. We’ve got the following “Severity” values:

5 - Much anger & crying - No workaround
4 – Anger & swearing - Difficult workaround
3 – Annoyance & frustration - Easy workaround
2 – Confused
1 – Laugh if notice

“Visibility” indicates how many users are likely to spot bug and how soon. E.g. it takes 10 steps to reproduce bug (random not straightforward steps), in a browser used by 1% of people -  or this is an error on Login Page for 100% users as they attempt to login.  Our Visibility values are:

1 - ~5%
2 - <50%
3 - >50%
4 - ~100%

“Class” shows relevance of bug in the context of product development strategy.  This value can differ for each particular company/project/product.  Speaking of TargetProcess, improving usability is paramount for us at the moment.  So, a bug with usability related Class will be more important than a bug found by Trial User.  Here’re the Classes we’ve got:

1 – No customer, Security
2 – Free/Trial user, Cosmetic
3 – Paid Customer, Usability, Whoops

Bug Pain is calculated based on this formula:

[Bug Pain] = X * [Severity] + Y * [Visibility] + Z * [Class],

where X, Y, Z are specified in the plugin setup (8, 5 and 4 respectively).  These values have been identified experimentally based on common sense for a cloud of bugs and may vary for each particular company/project/product:

bug-pain-calculated-automatically

Next, bugs can be filtered by Bug Pain value.  The most important and urgent bugs will be on top of the list and should be fixed first:

pain

This plug-in is a helpful tool for Product Owners and QA Teams as they prioritize bug fixes.

Bug Pain plug-in comes out-of-the box with TargetProcess now.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 17th, 2010 and is filed under plugin, whatis. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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    Celiac disease is usually the type of neuropathy called small fiber neuropathy often causes a burning, tingling and electricity, such as pain, but often identify with the routine use of neurologists diagnosed neuropathy confused. For details please visit http://www.small-fiber-neuropathy.com/  
  • Looks great. For folks interested in a bit of the theory behind the concept see this article:
    http://lostgarden.com/2008/05/improving-bug-triage-with-user-pain.html.

    I got the original idea for bug pain from a TQM class I took during my MBA and the idea has since been implemented in a surprising number of companies (including Anark, Nvidia and Microsoft). In addition to shortening triage cycle time, it also helps the devs since they have a clear and obvious metric for what to work on next.

    take care
    Danc.
  • stembi
    Great feature, to have it absolutely perfect, I would recommend the PAIN calculation as
    [Bug Pain] = (X * [Severity] + Y * [Visibility] + Z * [Class])/W
    Using this solution we can have weighted average ot the three PAIN base attributes.
    Please change the plugin so it will have the possibility to set the W parameter. In the case it will be set to 1, it will work as the original plugin.
    In turn, we can give the percentual importance to these thre PAIN base attributes.
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