When a technology issue arises in tech production, whether it involves requirements, design, or coding, everyone on the team needs them to be fixed as soon as possible. It is important for a company to build strategies for detecting, monitoring, and resolving bugs and issues. Established protocols keep team members on the same page and allow for the early detection of trends and problems before they become major roadblocks.
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Here are some ways to track and solve technology issues in your business.
1. Begin the development process
If you’re having trouble with quality assurance, the first place to look is at your production process. How high is the product going to be? How many features do you plan to include in each new version? Do all of those functions need to be in the product right now? In certain cases, the answer is “no.” Use testing to get a good picture of what’s needed and then concentrate solely on those features, adding more as you go.
2. Make use of Kanban boards
Use Kanban boards to keep track of successful development projects and technology issues. They are simple, reliable, and allow for easy bug and responsibility tracking. Project tracking and ticketing systems, such as Jira or OTRS, are essential to growth. It is important to track issues and have a mechanism in place to ensure that concerns and bugs are solved. Anything that involves reporting is beneficial in the long run. Software to track sales dashboard examples will also be of aid.
3. Keep track of bugs in a centralized database
It’s important to keep track of bugs in a central database with workflow and the ability to delegate bugs to the appropriate people. Have the person who reported the bug be the one who closes it and makes sure the intent is fulfilled. Bugs can also be labeled as “long-term”—for example, if an architectural change is required—or as a warning for work to be completed within a certain time frame.
4. Add bugs to the backlog of the product
Adding bugs that make it through the shippable increment to the product backlog exposes them to the production team. If bugs would ever be patched, it’s also recommended to move them to the top of the backlog. This generates a negative feedback loop: if the development team is making many bugs, their velocity will drop before they figure out what’s causing the poor output.
5. Obtain contextual bug and crash information
Bugs are usually not resolved until a more thorough investigation is carried out. Capturing contextual knowledge and grouping it around the same root causes is the first step in tracking and resolving problems. Crucial information can be retrieved easily with the aid of crash-reporting software.
6. Make an investment in AI and robotic process automation
In the long run, developing and constantly upgrading the algorithms that monitor the causes of bugs would pay off. There are several artificial intelligence resources available to monitor all bugs, such as ServiceNow. Still, the main point here is to spend time analyzing the root causes of these bugs and programming the software to fix and avoid future problems.
7. Make use of project management software
With project management software, everything is kept in a project management system that links team members and tasks to specific issues, allowing each individual to be held accountable for specific issues. This also informs you of what has been completed and what also needs attention. If required, another team member may assist.
8. Have quality assurance managers on staff
Every project that you develop needs to have a dedicated quality assurance team. Though it is more costly upfront, you will find that getting someone to test the product and codebase 24/7 is more effective in the long run than having to take your product offline and lose considerable sales as you address new bugs that arise.
9. Shift left to improve resilience
Because of software-defined infrastructure, even the company’s IT infrastructure will now have bugs — bugs that would have caused delays, outages, and security threats if they had gone undetected. Automatic, early resilience testing is a quick and painless way to monitor misconfigurations in real-time before they become a risk to resilience.
10. Take advantage of bug-tracking software
Bug-tracking software allows teams to keep track of technology issues like bugs and problems in one central location. Bug-tracking software such as Backlog, for example, helps the entire team to monitor bugs and problems, delegate tasks, track progress, and more. This type of bug-tracking software is particularly useful for allowing remote tech teams to collaborate from anywhere.
11. Get someone else to look at the code
To test the code for bugs and problems, you’ll need a fresh pair of eyes. No matter how smart you are, you’re bound to miss bugs in your code accidentally. It would help if you used the bug-reporting plugins for everything else. Plugins are available in almost every language. If you want to take it a step further, you can set up a bug bounty program to encourage bounty hunters to kill bugs.
12. Complete the circle
Establish a system to ensure that any issue is resolved by checking and closing the loop on the current project. This can be automated entirely or in part. If the loop isn’t closed within a certain amount of time, it’ll be escalated to a supervisor, and the cycle will repeat until the loop is closed.
13. Assemble a full-fledged team effort
It’s critical that problem-solving is a team effort and that each department keeps track of everything that doesn’t meet consumer standards. It takes a lot of time to make a product intuitive and easy, and the days of a QA team being in charge of finding every bug are long gone. By praising and highlighting examples of cross-team collaboration, you will build a constructive feedback loop.
14. Use sensors and machine learning to your advantage
Business owners can integrate sensors and machine learning into devices and solutions to help determine when they aren’t functioning properly in real-time. After analyzing the data and analytics obtained at these points, they can calculate their average life cycles and predict when service would be required, thus avoiding downtime and customer dissatisfaction.
15. Competition to get to the root of the problem
Understanding the root causes of bugs will help you avoid them in the future. By incentivizing flawless code completion, development teams can turn the bug-tracking process into a game, which can benefit customer-service teams. However, tech leaders must balance these rewards and those that encourage developers to take reasonable risks to keep them motivated to innovate.
Feature image courtesy Jeff Iasovski/Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0).
What do you think about these tips for tracking technology issues in your business? Did you find any of them helpful? Let us know on Twitter, or MeWe.
