I came across a LinkedIn post a few weeks (maybe? time is a blur) from Mike Vermeer where he made the simple statement:

Teams should aim for zero bugs in the backlog.

Then I was surprised-not-surprised that many of the commenters were confused about what this meant, and in defining bugs or quality - which isn’t the point of having zero bugs at all. The not-so-secret-secret is that all software ships with known bugs. Zero bugs in your backlog doesn’t mean that your product doesn’t have any bugs - it means that you “deal” with every single bug as it is discovered - either by fixing it, or choosing not to fix it.

No Time to Fix Bugs?

This should be a familiar story if you’ve been in software for a while. I worked on products at Microsoft with “feature complete” deadlines and “stabilization” periods in the schedule specifically for teams to fix bugs (or enough bugs that we felt better about shipping). For reasons that baffle me in hindsight, we too often separated building features and softw…