My biggest one is the backlog of bugs that isn't getting cleared. I believe that this is a symptom that we're not doing Agile right. We shouldn't be just pushing bugs into the backlog, we should be fixing them.
We have a rule: if the bug count (on P1 and P2 bugs) exceeds a certain, pre-defined, threshold, we down tools and work on bugs. This includes bugs-to-close. Dev are not allowed to get too far ahead of QA. Obviously, there's scope for triage. Some bugs get downgraded to P3, some get lifted into stories on their own. None of this happens without the agreement of the QA "champ" and the product manager. The threshold is tightened as we near release.
When we got a new release manager, he asked me how many bugs we had in the system. I said 4. He said: "4 bugs in the open stories? That's pretty good." I said: "No. 4 bugs total." We work hard to keep that count low. As I look at our
team dashboard this morning, we have 2 bugs to fix, 1 to close.
On the other hand, we do have 5 failing automated test suites (with a total of just short of 1000 automated tests; we don't do a lot of manual testing). I should probably look at those this morning...
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