After reading my Testing for Bug Bucks & Breaking The Rules post, In2v asked, “I was wondering if your team went on with that game and how it turned out. Would you update us?”

Sure.  The Bug Bucks game/experiment failed miserably.  It sounded good on paper but in practice it was too awkward.  When testers found bugs, they didn’t have the heart to ask Progs for Bug Bucks.  Go figure…

We like to joke about testers and Progs being caught up in some kind of rivalry. But when we’re actually performing our jobs on serious work, we want each other to succeed.  Both tester and Prog had an understanding that nobody was at fault; they were both doing their jobs.  When I asked TesterA why he didn’t take any Bug Bucks from ProgA, I was told ProgA would have been in Bug Buck debt (because of all the bugs) but it didn’t seem fair because many of the bugs were team oversights.

We could have adjusted the rules but I could see it was too awkward.   And just before management was getting ready to order some Bug Buck goods for purchase, I suggested we pull the plug.

So now I have a stack of worthless Bug Bucks on my desk, and a recurring hope to come up with a more fun way to perform our jobs.  I’m open to suggestions…