"Complaint as a Gift," or a Systematic Approach to Analysing Claims Regarding Testing Quality

In theory, “product quality is the responsibility of the entire team.” However, in real life, when users complain about poor usability or bugs, the complaints and accusations are often directed not at the whole team, but at the testers – “What were you looking at?!” Sometimes, complaints don't come immediately, but pile up after several frustrating failures — usually when product owners, key users, or developers run out of patience. Testers then receive a vague list of complaints and are forced to defend themselves, but this doesn't lead to much progress.

In this talk, I’ll share how we turned a chaotic stream of user and developer complaints into timely, structured feedback that helped us improve our testing quality.

Gradually, we moved from emails and calls with complaints to creating tasks for analysing missed defects, designed an analysis template, introduced a review process, and developed several approaches for structured retrospectives and corrective actions.