Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort.

In line with the above quote, we organized a quality-focused event called: THE BIG BUG HUNT! Apart from the usual format of the ‘typical-Bugathon’, we added a few elements to make the event more interesting, engaging, and even more fruitful.

How well did we do:

• We had an astounding response with almost a third of the organization participating and contributing towards finding bugs and suggesting improvements.
• A total of 170+ tickets were logged.
• High and Medium priority tickets among these were all picked up and fixed within the next two sprints.

What were the key objectives we set out to achieve?

• Get abundant participation so that we can find issues and suggestions from diverse viewpoints. We targeted people from different vertices, not just Engineering.
• Focus all effort and energy on critical areas and on finding quality bugs.
• Most importantly, speedy fixes to the logged bugs.

How did we manage to achieve our objectives?

1. The Bumper Participation: We Worked towards building a buzz around the event. Though we are techies, we were mighty proud of our marketing skills for the BBH :)
2. Teasers were sent out in mails and on Slack channels.
3. Follow-up emails were sent, each revealing more about the event bit-by-bit. One email revealed the date, while the other revealed the format. We had one to explain the points system(yes, we gamified it), while another talked about the ideal format of the Jira tickets(Since not all participants usually use Jira). The image below(followed by a detailed format) is such an example.

• Our CEO, Mr. Sparsh Gupta, was kind enough to not only endorse but also register and compete in the event, we were able to leverage this as an additional motivation to the entire team, across verticals, to participate. All through this phase, we emphasized the fact that this is not a tech event and everyone can participate and stand a chance to win the event.
• Focus & Quality: The rules for scoring were such that people were rewarded for finding good quality, meaty issues. Each reported(valid) issue could score in the range of 1-3, 3 being the highest. On top of that, a bonus point of 0.5 could be additionally scored if the bug was of a specific product area(the most business-critical). The image below shows the various categories prizes should be won in.

3. Speedy Fixes: The dev team too was a part of the ‘hunting-party’ during the event and started fixing the issues only after the event was over and the bugs were ranked and prioritized by the panel (comprising our CEO, Head of Engineering, Head of Product Success). This helped us take a structured approach picking them in the order of priority. The image below shows the same as communicated to the team.

All in all the BBH turned out to be a super-fun yet productive event with numerous other elements such as this live leader-board dashboard with hourly updates on the dedicated BBH Slack channel.