Bug Bash: Strategies for Shipping with High Quality
How Bug Bash can help to collect the early feedback from your team and ensure the launch of features with exceptional quality.
How to make Bug Bash successful and get the greatest outcome before the launching new feature? I am going to share my secret ingredients for Bug Bash recipe.
What is the Bug Bash?
It’s a collaborative process to get together with your team and do the feature exploratory and testing before the launch.
My suggestion is to organize Bug Bash once the feature or part of the feature is ready for testing. You should start as early as possible since the first feedback is so valuable not only for the bug discovering and also for the feature usability and uncover edge cases that were forgotten during the initial planning and design. You don’t need to wait until the feature is fully ready for testing to find out that navigation is not intuitive or the content (tool tips) are confusing, colors are not visible enough (accessibility issue), additional feature logic (edge cases) are not implemented, error states are missed. There are so many aspects you can quickly adjust since the feature is still in the develop process and PRs are not merged to master yet.
Who Should Participate?
It is usually organized by the Quality Assurance (QA) engineer, but in many small startups without a QA, any main stakeholder can take on the role of organizer.
The participants in a Bug Bash can vary depending on the company size. In a small startup, you can invite the entire company to participate and provide feedback. In a large company, you should invite key stakeholders such as developers, product managers, designers, QA engineers, and customer support representatives.
What is Bug Bash Template?
Bug Bash template is playing crucial role in effective organization. You can always reuse it for different features.
Here is my Bug Bash Template (coda, notion) that I am usually using to organize the Bug Bash. Here is a detailed step-by-step guide.
Bug Bash Step by Step Guide:
📢 Communication
Create a separate channel for the Bug Bash feature (Slack, Hipchat, Teams Channel, Email Thread or other app you are using for the team communication). It’s a great practice to keep everything in one channel, later you can reuse this channel for dogfooding and Beta feedback if you have those processes in your company.
👋 Hi All! Welcome to Bug Bash Session. In this doc you can find all testing information to get started! Please join [Slack/Teams Channel, Email Thread, etc.] to provide your feedback.
🕐 Timeline:
3 - 5 mins overview & instructions
20 - 23 mins testing session
3 - 5 mins wrap-up and next steps📝 Structure
In order to execute Bug Bash successfully, you have to create a clear instruction, scope, timeline and provide all required info for testing to make the session smooth and understandable for everyone.
🎨 Figma: [Link to Figma file]🌐 Test Environment: [Link or details about the test environment]📂 Testing Data: [Link or details about test data]✔️ Testing Scope: [Areas of the application to be tested]🚫 Out of Scope: [Areas not to be tested❗𝗞𝗻𝗼𝘄𝗻 𝗜𝘀𝘀𝘂𝗲𝘀: [Provide a list of known issues]👥 User Stories
To enhance communication and collaboration during the Bug Bash, it's crucial to create User Stories. These help participants understand the functionality from the user's perspective. To increase effectiveness, assign and divide user stories to participants. If time permits, encourage self-exploratory testing once the assigned user stories are completed.
🗃️ Collect Feedback
Explain how to report bugs or any feature feedback or improvements. What information to provide, ie: screenshoots, console logs, user info, platform and etc.
🐛 Bug Reporting: Please post your feedback with a detailed description, including screenshots and console logs at our channel [Slack/Teams Channel, Email Thread, etc.]. We'll take it from there. 🙌⚡ Triage
As a next step, schedule the time for triaging with the main stakeholders. Usually, block 10-15 mins time slot right after bug bash and go through each feedback and identify what is the priority, who is the owner, or if it needs an additional discussion to find a solution. You can use emoji for your convince to reply on the feedback thread. Here is an example:
🚨 Blocker
🔴 High Priority
🟠 Medium
🔵 Low
🎨 Needs design review
⚖️ Needs legal review
👤 Needs Product Manager review
🔍 Needs QA to reproduceHere is an example on how to triage bug bash feedback on Slack:
🐞 Bugs || Tasks Creation
By organizing and managing bugs and tasks after a Bug Bash, teams can ensure all problems are tracked. Setting up automatic task creation with Zapier or another tool the company uses would be beneficial.
Summary:
There will always be a sense of urgency to ship features quickly, but you should not ignore the quality. Participants in a Bug Bash are your first customers and can provide valuable feedback.
By involving a diverse group of participants, you ensure a comprehensive testing of the product. These sessions allow teams to identify and address issues early, preventing potential user dissatisfaction and reducing the cost of post-release fixes.
Regular Bug Bashes help shape your features and create a product users will love.
I look forward to hearing your feedback on how your Bug Bash (or your customized version of it) has gone.