💃 Stop firefighting with this formula 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! How’s that project going now that you’re in hyper-support? Are the bug tickets rolling in? QA & UAT missed a 💩-ton of stuff and now it feels like you’re days are filled with firefighting? Looking for a way out of the cycle? But, how do we provide support for our application while still building out the next versions and hitting our objectives? The answer isn’t sexy, but it’s necessary …

Agenda for today includes

• Foundations

• Stop firefighting with this formula

• Daily Principle

• All the Memes

Foundations

Understanding how to prioritize bugs 🪲 is all about supporting your solution while still achieving your goals. Plus, it’s really not all that hard. All it takes is a little bit of forethought and some stick-with-it-ness!

But, first, why would we even bother? I mean, all bugs need to be fixed eventually so isn’t it easier to knock ‘em out when they come up? The answer - ⛔ NO! All bugs are not created equal! Treating them as such is a recipe for you to get caught up with daily firefighting! I’ve been there - and it sucks.

How did I get out? By applying a simple formula against the bugs that came in to our team …

Stop firefighting with this formula

I’ll KISS 💋 - what we’re going to do is look at four (4) different categories and assign each a value that represents the influence the bug has on the category. The value range is 0 to 4.

0 Highest = 0, Lowest = 4

The formula follows these principles:

• 🧑‍🤝‍🧑Different people armed with the same information reach the same conclusion (most of the time)

• 🔼 High importance bugs are quickly handled

• 🔽 Low importance bugs don't derail high-value initiatives

✅ Impact 

This is the effect of the bug on users or your company’s reputation. So, how much the bug interferes with the users ability to perform a task or do their job. 💻We’re also taking into account if there’s a workaround or not.

✅ Clients affected

Here we’re talking about the likelihood a client is affected by the bug. 😡 Is this bug in place where it be tripped by every client/user? Or is it in a place where a single team will be impacted?

✅ Class

A bug’s class is determined by the type of requirement it causes to fail and the importance of that requirement. Bugs that jeopardize the stability of the entire solution 😭 will be assigned a higher priority than faulty functionality or performance related issues.

✅ Risk

This is all about the likelihood of a bug’s impact materializing within 3 months. If it’s already materialized then it’s a 0. 🔥 If it hasn’t, do your best to estimate when it will manifest. If you think it’ll show up within a couple of months then the team can start working on a fix.

Now you have the values assigned to each category, simply plug them into this formula to get the priority:

Priority = (¼ impact + ¼ members affected + ½ * class + risk)

💥 Boom, you’ll have a numeric value you can use to determine how important the bug! The lower the number, the higher priority!

Daily Principle

and now....Your Daily Memes