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I used to analyse performance of programmers in my team by looking at the issues they have closed. Many of the issues are of course bugs. And here another important performance aspect comes - who introduced the bugs. I am wondering, if creating a custom field in the issue tracking system "Blamed" for reporting the person who generated the problem, is a good practice.

One one hand it seems ok to me to promote personal responsibility for quality and this could reduce the additional work we have due to careless programming. On the other hand this is negative, things are sometimes vague and sometimes there is a reason such us "this thing had to be done very quickly due to a client's...".

What to you think?

Michal Czardybon
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    What do you plan on doing with this information and how much of a productivity decline will you accept because no one want to ever check in a bug and will fight to the death to avoid being the one to blame. – JeffO Jun 02 '14 at 20:22
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    http://programmers.stackexchange.com/q/154733/52929 – enderland Jun 02 '14 at 20:23
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    This is both a duplicate questions and a terrible idea, for reasons documented in the duped question. – whatsisname Jun 02 '14 at 20:37
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    It doesn't have to be negative. Quite frankly I would be delighted to have a one on one with a colleague about a tricky bug I created. Generally human nature makes this tough. Too many people take things personally. – ChaosPandion Jun 02 '14 at 20:41
  • It's not about blaming (at least I hope). Analysing mistakes and why they have been made is the first step of learning. As a side effect you will of course find out who did it. – JensG Jun 02 '14 at 21:14
  • Isn't this information available in your current version control software? What software are you using? – iveqy Jun 02 '14 at 21:38
  • finding programmers who have immense pride in quality work... but don't have emotions about being blamed for bugs... are rare. I have known two from hundreds I've worked with. – Michael Durrant Jun 02 '14 at 21:41
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    JensG it may not be intended to be about "blame", but when the OP creates a field called 'Blame' with peoples names in it, some people tend to see the obvious: you are blaming someone. It _is_ good to figure it out and analyze that I agree. Doing it via a field called blame does not seem a good approach imho. One alternative is to use retrospectives to review prior work. – Michael Durrant Jun 02 '14 at 21:43

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No, no, 1024 times no

What's important is to figure out how to prevent similar future bugs. Everyone makes mistakes, there is nothing to be gained from finger-pointing. Blaming people does not improve the process, nor does it help the team

Community
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Steven A. Lowe
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