I’ll never understand why some people think QA testing isn’t that important. It’s one of the most crucial stages of product design.

As someone who has experience testing apps and videogames, I also know it can be catastrophic to skip it or downplay it.

In this strange case, a QA analyst’s supervisor told him to stop logging all the bugs… And of course, his own words came back to haunt him later.

Let’s read the whole story and see what happened.

You want me to stop logging bugs? Okay, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

This happened a couple of years ago when I was working as a QA analyst for a mid-sized software development company.

I was part of a scrum team working on a new feature for a large enterprise client.

Our team was made up of the usual suspects: devs, a scrum master, a product owner (PO), and myself as the sole QA.

He liked his job. But some people didn’t care for it.

Now, I’m a pretty thorough tester.

I take pride in not just finding bugs, but documenting them clearly with steps to reproduce, screenshots, logs, you name it. Some devs loved me for it, others… not so much.

One dev in particular (we’ll call him “Mike”) really hated having bugs logged against his code.

He took it personally.

He had this passive-aggressive attitude where any issue I found was “user error” or “not a bug.”

The guy had a serious ego problem and believed his code was flawless.

We were getting close to a deadline, and I was logging a lot of issues, nothing catastrophic, but enough to warrant attention.

Some were cosmetic, others were functional, but all were valid.

His bug reports were useful if they wanted users to be happy, but alas…

Mike didn’t like that I was “slowing things down.”

During a sprint planning meeting, Mike went on a mini rant about how QA was “bogging the team down with unnecessary bugs” and how we “shouldn’t waste time logging minor issues that don’t block functionality.”

Surprisingly, the PO (who was also feeling the deadline pressure) sided with him.

He was basically blocked from doing his job well.

The decision was made: “From now on, only log critical/blocker issues. Everything else can be reported informally or ignored.”

I clarified.

Me: “So you want me to stop logging non-blocking bugs? Even if they’re reproducible?”

PO: “Exactly. Let’s focus on shipping.”

Me: “You got it, boss.”

He complied, and it went as you can imagine.

For the next two sprints, I only logged blockers, like, the app crashes or data corruption level stuff.

Everything else? I kept to myself. No documentation. No Jira tickets. Nada.

The release went live… and all hell broke loose.

Users were finding: buttons overlapping on mobile, broken tooltips, form validation failures, inconsistent date formats, slow load times on certain views…

None of it was technically blocking, but it made the experience feel amateurish.

But there wasn’t much they could do about it now.

Cue a VERY uncomfortable post-mortem with the client.

The PO asked why none of these issues were found during QA. I just smiled and said:

“They were found. But per your instruction, I didn’t log them.”

Silence.

Mike tried to chime in, but the damage was done.

Things changed after this.

Upper management got wind of the fiasco and mandated that all issues, regardless of severity, must be logged going forward.

Mike was moved to a different team shortly after (not just because of this, but it didn’t help), and I got an apology and a “thank you” from the PO.

Imagine calling bug exterminators and then telling them to ignore half the bugs. Yeah, that would be silly.

Let’s see what Reddit has to say about this.

Pro tip.

A reader shares their thoughts.

Food for thought.

Exactly.

This commenter shares their opinion.

Another reader chimes in.

Indeed.

It’s unprofessional to take bug reports personally.

They should be listening to the QA Tester, not gambling with the final results.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.