I see this practice on several teams, but I'm not sure if really works.
For me cause more problems because the team focuses his effort on the fight about the bug with QA and less to solve it.
Someone has used this strategy?
Money was collected for?
Camilo Martinez
Posted on • Edited on
Is it good or bad practice to make developers pay money for his bugs?
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Latest comments (38)
I assume that only developers are subjected to this policy and everyone else is free to make mistakes as they happen.
It is important to know that as humans, we are pretty flawed so it should come as no surprise that mistakes are made but all we can do is our best to rectify them.
Punishing someone for making mistakes can only go one of two ways, it will make them better at finding ways to avoid punishment or it will amplify the rate of mistakes tenfold.
I try not to be too heavily opinionated on this site (which doesn't always come that naturally!) but on this matter: NO.
That's a terrible idea. The worst. No. Never do this.
Also: No.
That seem incredibly counter productive,
you don't make mistakes only if you don't do anything.
More over any major feature or major refactoring prone to have bugs.
So if someone would tell me that I will have to pay for bugs if I have another option quit on the spot and if I don't(lets say its North Korea and only government have computers) do the absolute minimum to avoid been penalized.
A token fee, like a dollar contributed into the team bug jar? That can be good incentive.
I've heard of Scrum teams using the trick to curb tardiness/absenteeism to the daily Scrum stand-up meeting.
A punitive fee, like a day’s pay? Nope.
On a related note, for one project I was on, if any dev broke the build they were obligated to bring in donuts for the team. Mmmm, donuts.
I am not in favor of any of the above.
Hi Camilo,
While reading your other articles I stumble upon this post, and I have something to say on this as I had faced this in past.
My experience was not good about this strategy in past but it helped me to take important decision i.e to leave job.
While doing creative job like coding , bugs / errors happens , and to be frank sometime while working with new technology it happen a lot which gradually over time get perfected but only if a developer get a chance to improve skills, if the developer get penalized like this, developers thought get limited and focus on writing less codes and less scope the code to minimize bugs, I remember around 5 years ago my entire months salary get deducted due to this and which make me think to leave full time job which was the best decision of my life.
So accordingly to my past experience, it is very good practice if employer don't want developer to work freely and encourage developer to look for job somewhere else, and it's a bad practice of employer if employer want developer to work in peace.
Having said all that, I have also seen in some teams it's just for fun, those are fine, until if someone life and means of living not getting harmed, there should be no issue.
Hope I am able to express my past experience properly.
Thank, is good read it from some one who past through this.
Seems like a pretty bad work environment.
Altough I have heard of teams where the dev who broke the nightly build had to buy beers for the team. That is a fun little game and boost but being shamed for having bugs is a big no no in my book
Seek to learn, not to blame.
Insulting and toxic at best, No one should expose themselves to such horrible practice and working environment. I hope this horrible approach fade in time.
I have never heard of this approach before but I don't think it's a good practice. Sounds a kind of blame culture approach. I don't think is the way to go. Probably the team / company can find other mechanisms to make their deployments more robust (testing [unit, integration...], code coverage, stage environment...) instead of punishing paying money. At the end, people is the most valuable source of a company, let's take care of them!
Holy 💩, you should call to them in a public manner, that is ... so ... wrong.
First of all there is no software w/o bugs, it is just a matter of not discovering them.
If the amount is significant I could imagine a lot of negative side effects like
If the amount is symbolic it is a "wall of shame", which may have the same side effects and more on the social side.
Maybe they should focus on a "no-blame" and make the company learn how to stop having that bug in the future. What have they done to fix it, how it was found, what can be done to never see it again.