We usually consult the director or operations manager of the company to talk about fixing existing live bugs (you could say they are the product manager). You can visualise 3 streams of work, support tickets, new feature tickets and bug tickets.
- Support tickets are things that are spotted by live users, we have none of those right now.
- New features are self explanatory, new things to be added to the system. We have a lot here.
- Bug tickets can be a regression or unexpected behaviour (according to the spec).
So in the example of my original post:
- I spotted a bug in the testing environment, realised it’s actually an existing live bug which I think is high priority
- Consulted IT manager, they deem it as a medium so we do not need to fix it immediately. Bug fix is postponed
- The decision was made by IT without the involvement of the business, they are not even aware that this bug exists
Under normal circumstances, there would be meetings every fortnight or so between the scrum master and the product manager. But you can see this was not the case here. Given the workload we’re under to develop these new features, we tend not to pay a lot of attention to live bugs.
Technically, you could say this is not my problem and gets a bit into office politics, but I just wondered if anyone else has the same problem. It feels a bit dodgy to me not involving the business at all, we’re hiding all these away for ourselves ‘If they don’t discover the bug, then it’s not critical’.