Here’s a question that should be a blast from the past: “Is my bug fixed yet?”.

I don’t know, is your acceptance test for the bug passing yet?

Acceptance tests are often sold as being the way that stakeholders know that their signed-off feature is not going to regress during iterative development. That’s true, they probably do that. What they also do though is dramatically improve communication between developers and testers. Instead of having to faf around with bug tracking, commit comment buggery and build artifact change lists you can have your test runner of choice tell you the current status of all the bugs as well as the features.

Running acceptance tests is one example where keeping the build green is not mandatory. This creates a need for a slightly more complicated build result visualisation. I like to see a simple bar split into green and red with the number of failing tests. There may be a good day or two when that bar is totally green but in general your test team should be way ahead of the developers so the red bar represents the technical deficit you are running at any given moment.

If it starts to grow you have a prompt to decide whether you need to change your priorities or developer quality bar. Asking whether a bug has been fixed or when the fix will be delivered are the wrong questions. For me the right questions are: should we fix it and how important is it?

If we are going to fix a bug we should have an acceptance test for it and its importance indicates what time frame that test should pass in.