What is a bug bash

A bug bash is an event where your product, engineering and QA teams or several other teams across your organization come together to test your product and identify bugs.

Bug bashes usually have a purpose. Typically, the purpose is to identify problems within a specific part of the product. Sometimes, bug bashes happen with a broader objective to test out the entire product.

Because bug bashes are events where your team is playing with your product like a user would, they also help uncover user experience pain points and missing capabilities in your product.

When to run a bug bash

You should host a bug bash if

• youʼre building a new product and you want to reduce the number of bugs and unexpected behaviours before it launches

• your customers have recently submitted tickets or chats about several issues in a specific area in your product

• youʼre short on who can do QA and you need your entire team to chip in to help improve product quality

How to run a bug bash - playbook

Planning your bug bash

• Before hosting a bug bash, start by defining a clear purpose for your bug bash. Unless youʼre a product that just got built recently, focused bug bashes are the way to go. By defining an area your team should focus on, you help focus everyone’s efforts into improving product quality in that area.

• Announce the bug bash in advance so that your team members can plan to be available and work around their work schedule.

• If your team works across time-zones, make sure to organize this event within working hours for most of them.

• Create a Slack channel or Microsoft Teams chat and invite team members who are definitely expected to participate in the bug bash and post some of the guidelines mentioned below.

• Drop a note in a broader channel to invite volunteers beyond immediate teams who might be interested in participating.

• Multiple team members working on the same account in your product etc., is a bad idea during a bug bash. Different folks can execute things that lead to conflicting states, confusing them about actual product behavior. Remind your team members to create their own accounts or setup their own spaces in your production or live environments.

• Share some test cases ahead with your team members to give them some inspiration for flows they can test. Your test case list doesnʼt have to be exhaustive — it just has to spark good enough ideas for anyone reading it.

• Itʼs a great idea to list down common use‑cases or frequent flows that your users might be regularly doing in your product. The more eyes you have on these common flows, the higher the impact the bug bash would have on usersʼ perception of your software quality.

• Create an epic or a parent tracker ticket for the bug bash in your issue tracking tool like Jira and have your team file issues in this Jira — but donʼt make it mandatory.

Kick‑off

• Drop reminders in Slack and Teams channels a few days and a few hours ahead of the bug bash so that everyoneʼs got their setup ready.

• Remind users about the purpose of the bug bash, areas they should focus on and share test cases. Make sure to share the link to the parent tracker encouraging them to file issues beyond posting identified bugs to the channels.

• Have one mandatory rule: every bug a team member discovers must be posted to the Slack or Microsoft Teams channel. This is great for a couple of reasons:

  • the bug bash coordinator can use the message to create an issue against the parent tracker

  • the bug bash coordinator or another team member can easily see if something is a duplicate, and mention the original thread or tracker ticket where the issue is being discussed so that the poster can watch the original thread or ticket.

  • the bug bash coordinator or a team member can call out expected behaviors in the thread so redundant tickets arenʼt filed.

• Create a Zoom or Microsoft Teams meeting or a Slack huddle where people can hop-on or off if they have questions around product behaviour, if they feel stuck or if they have environment related questions.

During the bug bash

• The bug bash coordinator is responsible for making sure that the issues are tracked on Jira or another issue tracking software, but a team member must post issues they discover to the Slack or Microsoft Teams channel.

• Your Slack and Teams channels might be getting hundreds of messages once the bug bash begins. The product team shouldnʼt have to scan through issues that might be already fixed or being looked at — use Slack emoji reactions to your advantage to drive attention to issues that are actually critical.

  • For instance, you can use a

    • ✅ emoji to indicate that an issue has been fixed

    • 👀 to indicate that someone is looking at it

    • ❌ to indicate that itʼs not a problem (for tickets that maybe inadvertently raised around expected behavior)

• You can use Beam to screen record videos of unexpected behavior and bugs, along with network and console logs. This way, you can create time to find more bugs that improve product quality as opposed to having to write repro steps over and over again.

• Add Devin or any other AI coding assistant to this channel so that it can quickly create PRs based on issues identified and help you fix things faster.

• For issues that are really easy to fix, encourage your engineers to fix them and close them immediately. If youʼre not an engineer, you can have an Cursor, Windsurf, Devin or any coding assistant that can help you fix those issues faster.

Winding down when a bug bash ends

• After the bug bash ends, the bug bash coordinator can go through the channel to ensure that every issue has been logged in the issue tracking system. If the bug bash coordinator is the product owner for prioritizing problems to fix, they must

  • set a priority for each of the issues identified

  • decide which of the high priority issues must be fixed ASAP and communicate it immediately to the respective teams

  • decide which ones need to be cadenced later or assign owners who can decide on when some of the issues need to be fixed

  • call out issues that wonʼt be fixed

  • … and post a summary of this at the end of the bug bash.

• Make sure to thank folks who contributed the most by identifying issues and fixing them. They might have spent a few hours but their effort is going to have an outsized impact in product quality.

Roles and responsibilities

• The bug bash coordinator (typically a product manager or an engineering lead) should

  • own the agenda, invites, and reminders for the bug bash.

  • ensure every issue is tracked in the issue tracker, organize duplicates and prioritize issues.

  • posts a summary at the end of the bash and assigns follow‑up owners who will prioritize non-immediate fixes.

• Engineering leads or managers can own assigning issues to team members who can fix them, based on their expertise within the focus area. They can, of course, offer technical guidance and background for issues identified to help fast track fixes.

• IC engineers own pushing PRs and fixing problems and offering technical guidance and context.

• QA team members can offer environment setup help and can populate their test case data set based on new ideas that emerge during the bug bash.

• While everyone can identify usability problems and missing capabilities, product managers and designers should observe such problems more keenly and capture them.

• Both product managers and QA team members can share test cases, information on paths frequented by users, etc.

Tips?

If you’ve got any tips on how to run a bug bash, we’d love to hear. Why don’t you write to us support@gobeam.io or send a tweet to @gobeamio

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