I read a blog about Learning from your bugs at the start of the week and it got me thinking.
It was nice that it was from a developers perspective for starters. Also sounds like a dev I’d love to pair with!
“Bugs help us understand the system better, and they indicate how we can improve our coding, testing and debugging techniques.”
The only example I could think of that I’ve experienced was in number entry fields on our application. “e” is technically a valid number (epsilon which is a tiny number). The first lesson we learned was that our number crunching in the back couldn’t handle it. Once we had learned this we needed to figure out a way to stop it being allowed. The first sprint after this we handled it reasonably well. Then the next sprint a different dev picked up a story with a numeric entry field and a bug was raised against it. The sprint after that it happened again with another developer.
It took us almost 4 sprints to learn from our bugs. It’s a really simple example because basically I can’t think of any others.
I’m wondering if we’re now learning from our bugs without documenting it and I don’t realise it. Or we’re heading for another fall where we spend 4 sprints learning from a bug.
Has anyone else any good examples of learning from bugs? I’d be interested if there are other ways to learn from them than this method.