Why you should care about bugs
Why fixing bugs actually makes business sense
Author’s note: this follows another article I had written some time ago — Why are there bugs?
The constant struggle of resource prioritization
For anyone who has ever worked in software, especially those that are end consumer based and are hosted online, there’s this constant tug of war between “should we fix bugs” or “should we build the next shiny object”? Resources are finite so that always leads to the inevitable decision point of having to choose between the two.
What usually happens is unless the bug is not allowing the user to perform a function that makes money for the company, it gets de-prioritized in favor of new features. You really can’t blame software developers or product managers for the bias towards new features or a completely new product or product group — careers are made out of them. “Conceived, designed and led the development and go-to-market strategy of XXX product” or “Won YYY award for architecting and building ZZZ platform” are the stuff you find in heads of product and heads of engineering resumes. You don’t see “Led the fixing of critical bugs” on any resume.
So why am I saying that you should care about bugs?
Bugs are possible customer annoyances and annoyed customers are bad for business
Why do I use “possible customer annoyances” instead of “customer annoyances”? Well bugs are usually discovered by (a) customers or (b) the development team (which includes product managers) or QA. For the latter, it is possible that no customer would ever encounter the bug. However if a bug is reported by customers then we should sit up and take notice because (see [1]):
- When customers are unhappy, there’s a 91 percent chance they won’t do business with a company again
- Dissatisfied customers typically tell nine to 15 other people about their experience; some tell 20 or more
- A negative customer experience is the reason 86 percent of consumers quit doing business with a company
- Good customer experiences lead 42 percent of consumers to purchase again
Also if a customer has reported a bug that means she still wants to use the product. There could be 10 or more that would not be bothered to report and just move on to another competing product. I know I would (see my story about Virgin Atlantic later).
… if a customer has reported a bug that means she still wants to use the product. There could be 10 or more that would not be bothered to report and just move on to another competing product …
Just to make things real, I’ll tell 2 stories:
- My experience getting Yahoo! SMS Messenger to work reliably
- From unhappy Virgin Atlantic almost-customer to happy United customer
Yahoo! SMS Messenger
Back when SMS was still a thing, Yahoo! had a SMS product called SMS Messenger. At that time I had just joined the company as a mobile engineer in charge of our mobile services for South East Asia. Upon joining I first sought to understand the usage patterns of the SMS product. This was because prior to joining I had been in a startup in the SMS space so this was familiar territory. Almost immediately I found that the service was extremely unreliable as our servers would regularly get disconnected from the telecom carriers SMSCs (ie. SMS gateway).
To address the situation, I added simple log monitoring and also did a lot of eyeballing of logs. If the connection was broken I’d just have to perform a restart of the service and things would get restored. It was very tedious work but just by doing these simple steps, because the reliability of the service improved significantly, revenue from that service doubled in 6–9 months.
Sometimes, you don’t have to build new features or new products when all you need to do is make sure existing services just work and the network effect takes over
Unable to purchase flight ticket
Earlier this year, I was planning a trip to London and as the missus bought a ticket on Virgin Atlantic so we tried to get on the same flight there (and hopefully get seats next to each other). I personally liked to fly on Virgin as I have flown Virgin on domestic flights before and had liked the service. So I chose the flight and selected the seat on their website but then when it came to payment it just would not work. I frantically tried on the mobile app and even PayPal in the fear I would lose the seat but it was to no avail. In the end I gave up and as I had flown United the year before, went on their mobile app and found a suitable flight and I purchased the ticket in no time. It was a breeze! Later on, when I actually took the flight I actually found it to be surprisingly pleasant. I took another trip to London later in the year and I didn’t even try Virgin. I just booked my flights on United.
Conclusion
I hope I have convinced you that fixing bugs matter (sometimes at the expense of new product development) and that it makes great business sense. I’m sure mine are not the only stories of absolute frustration with buggy software. Happy to get connected to learn more.
References
[1] The Secret Ratio That Proves Why Customer Reviews are So Important, Feb 26 2018, Andrew Thomas, https://www.inc.com/andrew-thomas/the-hidden-ratio-that-could-make-or-break-your-company.html
