Bug Bash April-2014

Published on : Apr 18, 2014

Category : Kovai.co

Gokul Dhamodaran

Author

This is an interesting blog post to write as the request came from a member of our internal team and based on a couple of requests from our followers in Social Media when we had published about bug-bash. We are a small growing team who want to deliver successful world-class software. It’s the culture that is getting imbibed into every one in our team by our “Walk the Talk” founder & CTO, Saravana Kumar. He leads from the front and sets our high standards. We have grown considerably from a 2 member team to 12 members in less than two months. When we were getting ready to plan the release of a new version of our flag-ship product, BizTalk360 7.2 version, we set some realistic goals to achieve in our team. Let’s walk you through the journey about the goals we set and how we achieved them. Team Communication: One of the key aspect of any successful organization is effective communication. It becomes tougher when you work as distributed teams. To fuel the process of getting to know each other and ease the feed-back loop between teams, this activity served as a perfect ice-breaker for us. The India team started around 9:30 AM (IST) with a kick-off note of our goals for the day and the UK team joined in a couple of hours (around 7 AM). We opened a conference bridge and started working together. It was good to see how each member saw a value in what they were contributing and help each other. This exercise helped us to talk to each other and get an good understanding of the product. Some of the terminologies and items which we (would) have spent hours to debug/understand were learnt in minutes. By sharing knowledge we were able to learn a few things faster. A picture is worth a million words (Our team in action) Test Feature Items ready for release, Identify any new bugs  & fix them: The other goal we set for our team was to test all the features that were part of this release. We interchanged the modules on which each team had worked before (well before the activity began!) to provide an opportunity for  teams to know about functional aspects of other modules. This provided a significant result of each team member learning about an un-chanted territory in our product. When they were stuck, there were other members to offer help right-away.  This brought in a greater level of understanding of our product across the team and also helped us to identify a few bugs, usability issues and enhancement that can be made to our product. bugBash   Quick stats: We had approximately 50+ featured items in our issue list. During our testing, we noted around another 50+ items to the list and added approximately 30+ new feature requests. Extreme pair programming, peer review of the code, the right attitude to deliver the successful product was the outcome of our event. A huge shout-out goes to the quick leg-work our QA team did to get things in place for this exercise with a very short notice and our star coders who fixed a few critical bugs. If you are a young start-up , hope you got some pointers here. If you have any feedback we would love to hear. After all, our goal is to create a bug-free software & WOW our users !!