How Many Bugs is too Many?

You are in a team and there are a lot of bugs. You ask, how many bugs are too many? And how do you balance the work? And how about the team morale?

Balance of Work

In times like this, work competes between fixing the bugs, doing product work and doing tech debt work. So how do you balance these? You balance these by "spending" an error budget.

An error budget is is the maximum amount of time that a technical system can fail without contractual consequences. So you can simply use that, to gauge whether you have to address bugs. But, for that you need SLOs and SLAs.

From the above link:

Error budgets aren’t just a convenient way to make sure you’re meeting contractual promises. They’re also an opportunity for development teams to innovate and take risks.

The development team can ‘spend’ this error budget in any way they like. If the product is currently running flawlessly, with few or no errors, they can launch whatever they want, whenever they want. Conversely, if they have met or exceeded the error budget and are operating at or below the defined SLA, all launches are frozen until they reduce the number of errors to a level that allows the launch to proceed.

If you don't have SLOs and SLAs, then the error budget might be a bit more subjective. If you always have a contract of 80% feature work and 20% tech work as is common in many companies, this might be all you have to deal with.

Morale

The morale might not be affected if it's a high performing team with a blame free culture. But for teams that might be newer or less mature, you might need to tread carefully before openly discussing there being too many bugs. To make the conversation more objective, try to use the above to steer the conversation.