Predicting Bug Trends

Have you ever wondered if there might be a cool way to predict your bug trends? I'm not sure this is useful for all customers, but for large shops like us where we have to be so aggressive about finding, tracking and fixing bugs, having a deep understanding of bug trends can be one more great tool in terms of creating transparency and predictability in your development process. The Microsoft teams have been thinking about this too. Recently the Microsoft Office team sent us a really nifty Excel-based tool which they use to predict their bug trends. The tool analyzes their bug trends from previous releases and, based on current incoming, projects what their bug trends will be for the current release. I thought this was pretty cool!

Andrew Delin on the VSTS team was looking at whether we could productize this into our shipping reports for our next release. This one isn't scheduled to ship in the box. After a ton of customer discussions about our stack rank, it looks like this particular one is below the current cut line – we've heard a lot of feedback that this is better to give to customers directly. So, Andrew has posted this out to the community in raw form. Even if we don't ship it, we wanted to share the ideas with the community and also let people pick up the prototype in case they want to customize and use it.

So, if you're curious on ideas for how to set something like this up, you can find more information on Andrew's blog post here: link. Hope that is useful.

Thanks!

Steph