Linear

Linear maintains a zero-bug policy requiring all bugs to be fixed within 7 days (low priority) or 48 hours (high priority). The company cleared their 175-bug backlog in three weeks and established practices including daily bug triage, load balancing through dashboards, and eliminating the option to defer bugs to backlog. This approach has led to fixing over 2,000 bugs annually, improved customer relationships through rapid response times, and created a quality-focused engineering culture that prevents bugs proactively.

Why we committed to a zero-bugs policy

Zero-bugs starts by clearing the backlog ⁠

Zero-bugs is not just a practice, it’s a value ⁠

What I think people miss here is the big picture of why they’re actually doing this. It all goes down to the core narrative of the company. They aim to position themselves against Jira. So they picked Jira’s biggest weakness - product quality - and they double-down on anything that would make the market see them as the “quality alternative to Jira” without saying those specific words. Quite clever I must say, and seems to be working great. Whether zero bugs is sustainable or not? Idk time will tell, but for now this is more about business than engineering.

This isn’t the norm?
Anyway, here’s my favourite big quote.
“To the best of my knowledge my system has never had an undetected error”

We also follow <code>0</code> bugs policy for every release. If we can’t fix any we defer the bugs to next release :D

You’ve outlined a well-articulated modern example on the benefits of quality assurance versus quality control, something that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">W. Edwards Deming</a> evangelized <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Deming-Management-Method-Mary-Walton/dp/0399550003" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">75 years ago</a>. And yes, it’s very possible. Just for many it’s inconceivable… unless they build emergency call centers, airplane systems, or space shuttle software, where the effect of a bug is more catastrophic than a shopping cart that mysteriously empties.
A developer years ago at Outbrain told me they pushed to production 50 times a day. <a href="https://medium.com/outbrain-engineering/how-to-prevent-bugs-from-reaching-production-31a19d6354f6" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">A similar focus</a> on quality. And he said there as well that the common response was disbelief.

Does Microsoft Commit to Zero Bugs Policy