How we abandoned bug assessment meetings using a telegram bot and what came of it

Previously, our team met at certain intervals (usually once every 2 weeks) and assessed bugs. The manager, QA lead and development lead came. The meeting took 0.5 – 1 hour. We did not always have time to evaluate everything, and the tail of unappreciated tasks dragged on, and even something was lost. One day, it dawned on our manager to evaluate bugs through a telegram bot in order to (1) know at the moment how critical the bug is, (2) not waste time on a meeting, and (3) evaluate it at any time. As a result, we wrote down the logic according to the following scheme:

1. Creating a bug in the tracker

2. Tracker calls tg-bot

3. Tg-bot sends a notification “Add importance to the bug” to the chat with a link to the bug and calls 3-amigo (manager, developer and tester)

4. 3 amigos replay the bot’s message with numbers from 1 to 100, where 1 is a blocker, 100 means we’ll fix it someday.

5. After all the amigos have rated them, the bot finds the average and assigns the importance to the bug. By the way, there is an option – if at least one evaluator gave a rating and sent a “stop” replay, then the bot takes the existing ratings, finds the average and assigns importance to the bug.

6. In the tracker, we previously created a filter that includes tasks sorted by importance.

What happened

Pros:

1. We got rid of unappreciated bugs,

2. In the channel we discuss why such a rating, influence, etc. By the way, due to the discussions, the number of bugs assessed during the meeting was reduced.

3. Saved ~2 hours per month :),

4. Other teams started using the feature, and it also saves time (super!)

5. By the way, one of the teams began to use tg notifications as notification of bugs.

Of the minuses:

1. We encountered a problem that in the flow of notifications tasks for evaluation were lost or one of the amigos did not indicate the importance, which means again tasks were not evaluated 🙁

2. They didn’t think that it should be possible to re-rate a bug until they rated it.

What do we do next?

1. In order not to lose ratings, we will create a feature that will collect TG links to invaluable bugs every day at a given time and upload the selection to the channel.

2. For bugs that not all amigos have rated, we also notify them, but at a given time every day we take the available ratings and give them.

3. Give the opportunity to re-rate bugs until someone sends a stop or all ratings are given.

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