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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

#71

Post by Nimi »

swah wrote: post #65
cletus wrote: post #46

One tradition I really appreciate at Google is the post-mortem. Any serious outage or bug will be followed by a detailed post-mortem detailing a timeline of what went wrong and why. Sometimes this will go as far as establishing a "war room", possibly for weeks, dragging in people from a number of different areas to address a particular issue. It's not about pointing the finger or otherwise apportioning blame. It's ab…

Interesting. That reminded me of this book "Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle" which says their military runs the same procedure in a similar way after missions.

As an Israeli, I can vouch for the massive ass-covering that goes on there. In fact, we just had a big public ass-covering demonstration regarding the awful flotilla blockade. Regardless of what one thinks of the political aspects and/or morality of that action, the purpose was to examine why were several soldiers injured and Israel's relationship with Turkey, previously a strategic ally, deteriorated. Both these results were seen as failures of the mission. The ass covering was plain for all to see, on the national news. I agree that the Israeli army has a very substantial contribution to the high level of entrepreneurship and technological achievement in the country, but effective organizational behavior is definitely not something you want to pick up from the IDF.

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

#74

Post by excuse-me »

droithomme wrote: post #69

Joel Spolsky refused to add a "blame" field to FogBugz for years, he used this as an example of how you should not give the customers every feature they demand, and he said it was one of the top most requested features. He explained that once you add that field it will be the end of fixing bugs and making honest bug reports. Developers will work with QA so that bugs don't get entered into the system. Long arguments w…

I always just blame it on the Boogie

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

#75

Post by m104 »

Spooky23 wrote: post #33

I was a senior manager in an organization where one of my peers essentially inserted a similar blame regime into our incident management process. It is a poisonous practice, but I actually loved my job and wanted to improve the place. So my team fought back. The way that you defeat a system like this is to use it. Be humble, honest and calm, and go out of your way take the hits. But refuse to be blamed for things tha…

This is so much better advice than "fight the system", "convince your boss", "use these talking points", etc.

If the poster really wants to keep that particular job, but wants to also improve the environment, they need to start following all of the rules they don't agree with to the letter. The worst thing that can happen is that it actually improves the team somehow.

It's not always the right way to make change, but in these situations it really can be the best route. Bad rules and procedures can only be (officially) recognized as such when they're actually being used. There's no need to make a mockery of this stuff, either, because time will tell whether the new rule is really helping or hurting.

Like you say, humble, honest, and calm.

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

#76

Post by eru »

[deleted] wrote: post #14
scott_s wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a toxic work environment, and I'm not sure from verb-tenses if you're still there or not. If you are, find another place to work. Your quality of life will improve.

[deleted]

Practice.

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

#77

Post by eru »

petdance wrote: post #73

That kind of mentality is exactly why it's wrong to have "svn blame" and "git blame" as commands. The very commands that we use to look at code history teach us that it's all about finger-pointing.

I always understood `blame' to be a light-hearted nickname, and `annotate' to be the official names of these commands. By the way, mercurial also has a `praise' synonym, if memory serves me right. (Or was it another one?)

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

#78

Post by vinhboy »

Am I the only person who thought this might just be a joke, or a way to make the whole bug fixing process more light hearted... I don't think I would be offended if my name got put on such a field, because I am sure everyone would end up on it eventually. Reminds me of the time we passed around a duck toy in the office to anyone who screwed up that day.

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

#80

Post by Diederich »

cletus wrote: post #46

One tradition I really appreciate at Google is the post-mortem. Any serious outage or bug will be followed by a detailed post-mortem detailing a timeline of what went wrong and why. Sometimes this will go as far as establishing a "war room", possibly for weeks, dragging in people from a number of different areas to address a particular issue. It's not about pointing the finger or otherwise apportioning blame. It's ab…

My company, LiveOps, does the same thing. Every customer impacting issue gets a post-mortem, and some non-customer impacting problems get one.

We have good stability (we hit four 9s recently), but we're always pushing for me. The post-mortem process is very positive and affirming. That's because it's transparent, as it should be.

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