Back in Chapter 8, Tightening Feedback Loops in the Software Development Life Cycle, we discussed how we tighten feedback loops from a variety of sources for us to ascertain two things:
- Are we building the right thing?
- Are we building the thing right?
Bug reports are a form of feedback that we should welcome, as they are the most straightforward problem detection system we could ask for. They cover many facets of our software, from a user requirement not being quite right to a broken API connection, from the user experience not being satisfactory to performance being suboptimal.
Some teams try to argue that a bug isn't, in fact, a bug. For example, they may say it's a case of the business requirement being wrong. Perhaps the user didn't know what they wanted. This is old-school contract thinking, which gets litigious because of the upfront promises...