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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

#131

Post by PerryCox »

jaylevitt wrote: post #127
Devilboy wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very well-known phenomena. If you don't feel anything after a bug in your code cost your company lots of money and your team members many days in debugging and fixing it... then you're like nobody I've ever worked with.

Really? My first major software release took the AOL mail system down for 34 hours. My later work kept it up for 8 years. I consider both equal fodder for bragging, self-immolation, and war stories over drinks. I couldn't tell you which taught me more.

I think what the previous commenters are trying to say is that you shouldn't be OK with producing lots of bugs. Sure, you can learn a lot when you make a mistake, but you shouldn't be making the same mistakes.

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

#132

Post by run4yourlives »

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.

Almost all armies do this, and they do it really, really well.

As a veteran I can tell you that everything you do is critiqued, and everything your boss does is critiqued, and so on.

At certain levels it's peer review, at others, hierarchtical. The whole point of it all is to increase your chances of survival.

It's a great process, and I've noticed that most military folk are great at speaking plainly and accepting critique, much more so than civilians. I beleive these processes are a huge part of the reason.

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

#133

Post by vacri »

jaylevitt wrote: post #127
Devilboy wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very well-known phenomena. If you don't feel anything after a bug in your code cost your company lots of money and your team members many days in debugging and fixing it... then you're like nobody I've ever worked with.

Really? My first major software release took the AOL mail system down for 34 hours. My later work kept it up for 8 years. I consider both equal fodder for bragging, self-immolation, and war stories over drinks. I couldn't tell you which taught me more.

That sounds like you feel something about both of those things.

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

#134

Post by krishnakv »

ww520 wrote: post #82
reitzensteinm wrote: post #32

The top answer has it exactly right. This should be Root Cause, since ultimately even bugs caused by human errors are really caused by systemic flaws. Some examples: * SQLite has 1177 times as many tests as code (not a typo) * Live television is broadcast with a 5-10 second delay * IMVU automatically reverts commits pushed to the site if regressions are detected * Netflix implemented a system called the Chaos Monkey,…

Changing who to why is brilliant. That encourages investigation and understanding of the problem.

+1 on "root cause" being the field rather than "person to blame".

"person to blame" pre-supposes that the root cause is a person, which is not true in most cases. While programmers do introduce bugs due to oversight, I have seen that systemic issues (build environment doesn't allow for tests to be written, missing patches in legacy architecture, bad staffing decisions etc...) introduce a large percentage of defects, especially in larger projects.

If your manager is really interested in reducing defect injection, you will want to champion root cause analysis (read up on it - Karl Wiegers and others have some some great work on this).

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

#135

Post by motters »

What happens when there is a "culture of blame" is that innovation falls to zero (or lower). When people are scared of being blamed for things, and potentially also fired with little prospect of re-employment, then they just stick very rigidly to whatever they believe their job description to be, and never seek to explore new possibilities. The classic phrase is "it's more than my job's worth".

In a culture of blame anything new or different is seen as bad, and to be avoided at all costs, because the unknown nature of the new might also bring blame with it.

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

#136

Post by jaylevitt »

Devilboy wrote: post #125
damoncali wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it interesting that you'd feel shame over a bug. Why?

This is a very well-known phenomena. If you don't feel anything after a bug in your code cost your company lots of money and your team members many days in debugging and fixing it... then you're like nobody I've ever worked with.

You're right. I feel sheepish and proud and part of a bigger effort, but I do not feel nothing.

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

#137

Post by mayanksinghal »

PerryCox wrote: post #131
jaylevitt wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? My first major software release took the AOL mail system down for 34 hours. My later work kept it up for 8 years. I consider both equal fodder for bragging, self-immolation, and war stories over drinks. I couldn't tell you which taught me more.

I think what the previous commenters are trying to say is that you shouldn't be OK with producing lots of bugs. Sure, you can learn a lot when you make a mistake, but you shouldn't be making the same mistakes.

I think the bragging part of the bug that brings the system down for hours and requires significant efforts in RCA is that the initial work was important and the bug likely to be non-trivial. Non-trivial bugs happen. I will not be proud of small stupid bugs I make but non-trivial bugs, the discovery of which brings sort-of an excitement - that is something I can be proud of.

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

#139

Post by mdkess »

damoncali wrote: post #120
wccrawford wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good programmer will feel shame from that whole process even if nobody points the finger at them. The blame game just isn't needed. A bad programmer shouldn't work there in the first place, and if they need to be blamed, they're probably doing other things to destroy morale.

I find it interesting that you'd feel shame over a bug. Why?

I feel shame over bugs. Of course, it depends on the nature of the bug, but there are definite moments of deep self reflection, which I think that I internalize as shame. While I reflect and move on, as a professional, I should be making as few mistakes as possible. When a star hockey player screws up a play that could have won their team the game, I imagine that they feel shame - not that they will get fired for the incident, but self relection is how you improve, and in many people, that manifests as a healthy amount of shame. (Not that I'm the Gretzky of software development).

Recently, a piece of code that I wrote crashed after running for over a month because I forgot to lock one of several methods that was concurrently accessing a collection. I was very ashamed of this - this was an amateur mistake, and one that someone with the amount of experience that I had should not have made. I didn't get any any trouble for this, but I was pretty ashamed. "I am better than this, and I should not be making this sort of mistake," I thought and have been very careful to avoid this sort of thing since.

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

#140

Post by damoncali »

mdkess wrote: post #139
damoncali wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it interesting that you'd feel shame over a bug. Why?

I feel shame over bugs. Of course, it depends on the nature of the bug, but there are definite moments of deep self reflection, which I think that I internalize as shame. While I reflect and move on, as a professional, I should be making as few mistakes as possible. When a star hockey player screws up a play that could have won their team the game, I imagine that they feel shame - not that they will get fired for the…

I'm not dogging people who feel bad over bugs, I just don't feel that way myself. I've never written a bug-free piece of software, so I just accept that bugs are part of the deal. When I screw up, I just fix it. On the bad ones, I feel a tinge of regret (as in "oops, my bad. Let me help correct that.") if I inconvenienced anyone else, but nothing I would call shame (which to me implies internalizing negative emotions about one's self).

I don't write perfect software, and I never will. I'm choosing to not feel bad about that. It's all matter of perspective and expectations, isn't it? My colleagues can think less of me if they like - that's their baggage, though, and I won't pick it up. Shame is dangerous, and leads to a lot of the communications errors that developers make, which are often worse than the bug itself, or even the cause of it.

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