Using Bug SLAs to Understand and Improve Quality at Scale by Pete Nichols

Today, Pinterest has hundreds of engineers working to bring Pinners the inspiration to create a life they love. Bug management is a critical part of ensuring a high quality experience for those Pinners. Every week, we identify hundreds of bugs, and it is crucial to have a scalable system for identifying, tracking, managing, and addressing them in a timely manner. In 2018, we realized our processes around bug management were no longer sufficient for our rapidly scaling product, team, and technology base. Our teams were working hard to fix bugs, but the number of issues in our bug DB was growing. At the same time, confidence in the quality of the data in the bug DB was shrinking. To address this challenge, we implemented a Bug SLA (Service Level Agreement) process, and it has significantly improved our ability to understand and raise the quality of our product. Putting this process in place at scale required a combination of project management, technology, and - most importantly - engineering cultural change. We'd like to share what we learned along the way about the benefits and limitations of this approach, how it fits into our overall strategy of building a strong technical foundation, and the next steps we're taking to further improve quality.