avocado8

QRB

I know this is my third blog post of the day (so much for forgetting to blog once the in-laws walked in the door!), but I'm so darn touched over this that I have to spew some more.

I received this tiny little trophy by FedEx today. No note was in the box, but the three little letters in the middle of the inscription were all my heart needed: QRB.

QRB stands for Quality Review Board, a term we used on the Dreamweaver team at Macromedia and that's still in use today. (Adobe folks will be more familiar with BRC, which I think stands for Bug Review Council.) In any case, QRB is all about reviewing bugs that have been reproduced by someone in QA/QE (Quality Assurance/Quality Engineering) and determining whether they should be opened (and to whom) or deferred. Sometimes we know that a bug is a duplicate of another, or that it's already been fixed and will be in the next build, and we can get the bugs off the QRB list that way.

[See this somewhat related post on Coding Horror that I happened to read today for more on bug categorization and deferral: That's Not a Bug, It's a Feature Request.]

QRB used to meet at least three times a week; there were four or five core members who participated in every meeting, and usually two guests (one engineer and one QE) per week. I was one of the core members, and I actually enjoyed QRB. I liked having the 30,000 view of the product, as it were; I had an idea of which features were wonky, which features were relatively stable, where the gaps in our feature (especially legacy feature) knowledge were.

I'd just been saying to Al recently that I missed participating in QRB... and then this little trophy arrived, as if to say that QRB missed me, too.