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My boss decided to add a “person to blame” field to every bug report

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Re: My boss decided to add a “person to blame” field to every bug report

#21
As one commenter already said: the best way of avoiding blaim is to not make any major modifications or write difficult code. This way you avoid creating bugs. So there is a huge risk that this will reduce productivity.

A root cause analysis should ask "five whys" as to why this happened. Tight schedules, bad specs, improper training? Blaiming everything on the individual who checked the code in is not going to be very accurate, and probably very bad for morale.

Re: My boss decided to add a “person to blame” field to every bug report

#24
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

In interviews, remember never to mention anything negative about your current job no matter how you are treated, because that makes you seem like a negative nancy! Who knows, maybe you will even complain if you are treated poorly at your next job?

[deleted]

Re: My boss decided to add a “person to blame” field to every bug report

#27
Although I tend to agree that morale would decline I do not know the full story of the working environment.

If you have an idiot coder that has been there forever and is hard to get rid of then this field would come up in their evaluation. Needless to say it may get overlooked on other peoples evaluation. It may be used as a way to manage some muppet out the company for wasting everyone's time.

But I don't know the full story, the boss may be a control freak and an idiot himself but he may be actually trying to improve working conditions, he just chose the wrong terminology for the field.

Re: My boss decided to add a “person to blame” field to every bug report

#28
post #6

[deleted]

Oh, how I know this. The worst part is, this tends to stay with you in other jobs. In takes time to consider the possibility that maybe bringing a new idea to the table isn't a risky affair.

Now, others already advised you to quit the job — but that's obviously not so easy. But be careful, and if you can, find another outlet for creativity, because this can seriously damage both what you can offer to other companies, and how much you'll be able to enjoy any job.

Good luck.

Re: My boss decided to add a “person to blame” field to every bug report

#29
I wish bug trackers were better equipped to help find the real root cause of bugs, and more teams actually tried to track that data. Were the specs bad? Is there a problem with our process? Did we not write enough tests? Did someone just screw up?

As it is, bug trackers are good at collecting information and letting you create a process that is as convoluted as you'd like to track the work towards coming up with and releasing a fix, but leave much desired when it comes to trying to reduce your overall defect rate.

That said, trying to pin the blame on someone is the absolute worst way to accomplish any of this, and virtually guarantees that any "root cause" information you try to gather is going to be completely useless.

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