Sunday, June 05, 2011

Cash for Bugs

I love my job. Part of what makes it interesting is finding and fixing bugs. What alarms me is how long it sometimes takes to find a bug. So recently I took a different approach with my biggest customer: for each new bug found and reported, the person who found the bug gets a R100 cash reward.
On Thursday I paid out R300 for bugs in a new module that I could swear I tested thoroughly. I guess not. But I was glad to be able to pay out the money, because they haven't found any problems since. And there are a few happy call centre operators who reported the problems.
I have now got a backlog of bugs to fix, many of them minor but annoying. I doubt if half of them would have come to my attention so soon without the reward. And certainly it gives me more confidence that next time I make changes to the program that I'll be hearing sooner rather than later about anything I overlooked or missed during testing.

1 comment:

Arne said...

I like the way you thought on this one. I'm also struggling with a lot of bugs being missed on releases, and this sounds like something we can use with some of our "non technical" users :-)