How We Fix Bugs at Harvest

As Harvest’s team has grown, we’ve had to evolve our bug-fixing process. Years ago we developed a concept called Delta Force as a way to protect the bulk of the development team from a constant need to respond bugs. On a rotating basis, one person would handle escalated support and fix bugs as time allowed. This used to keep us collectively sane.

In 2014 we discovered this no longer worked well for us. When a developer would take their turn on Delta Force, they would feel the weight of numerous unfixed bugs all day and well into the night. They would wake up with a hopeless feeling. When you fix three bugs in a week while four new bug reports come in, you’re bound to feel disappointed in yourself. The additional strain of a growing customer base, and by extension more need for escalated customer support, made for an untenable situation.

The development team got together and brainstormed ways to make the process of fixing bugs more bearable. Not only did we want to improve the life of whomever was in that Delta Force role, but we also wanted to lower our bug count from week to week.

We found that most of the stress of the Delta Force role was coming from bugfixing, not from escalated support. We decided to separate those roles – to put bugs in the hands of the entire development team. Rather than defining goals like we had in the past (Bug count less than ten! Fix five bugs per week!), we simply asked people to claim a bug at the beginning of the week and do their best to fix it. Some bugs are big and take longer. Some bugs are quick and feel a little cheap. It’s all good!

Through our brainstorming process we also learned that there was wide support across the team for a bugmash week — a week where the whole team would pause their full-time projects and focus on bugfixing. We kept that in our back pocket during the summer. As Harvest continued to grow and bugs continued to accumulate, we decided to give a bugmash week a try.

For a week in late September we each claimed a small pile of bugs and set to work. We touched everything from customer-reported bugs to monster queries to support tools to staging environments to stale, abandoned code. We spent 326 hours closing over fifty-five bugs in the Harvest suite of applications. We couldn’t be happier with the results.

Keep this lesson in mind as your organization grows. Processes that you trusted and felt confident about for years can become obsolete. The trick is to change how you do things without changing the good intentions behind the original structure. And don’t forget that you‘ll probably have to change again in the future.

Of course, it never hurts to have an amazing team that can work together with skill, humility, and supportiveness. :)