My last client decided to continue without dedicated testers. They hired me to help their teams out with quality instead. This was exactly the challenge I was looking for!
First few weeks I did the testing for them. We then looked around for a system that worked where I’m not the gatekeeper for what goes to production. So I organized a one-off bug bash session.
A session where everyone of the team spends 45 minutes to look for bugs and finish it off with a debrief of 15 minutes. We found so many bugs in these 45 minutes, we spend almost 45 to go over them! We spent too much time going in to the bugs, lesson learned. After this session the team was sold on the idea. After this we started doing them weekly!

How we ran our sessions
So every Monday we’d use the standup to agree on a focus for the bug bashing session. At 13h I’d post a thread that would be used to post a screenshot and a short description. Then after 40 minutes we’d join the debrief call and go over all the issues we found. The search would be async, where the debrief would be sync. This allowed people to search with focus and purpose.
In the debrief we’d discuss why this is an issue and who should solve it. We’d sometimes wander into how to solve it, but we’d try to avoid that as much as possible to keep the debrief concise. With the solving team appointed the issue would get a emoji as a tag. A volunteer would then create tickets for tracking purposes and post the result.
Advantages and learnings
Making this part of our strategy had many advantages for the team. They really took ownership of the product and it’s quality. They knew the state and could release with confidence and knowledge. Everyone knew about all issues and the state of newly developed features. The gap between designers, back-end and front-end engineers closed as they became 1 unit. Engineers had ownership about their own domain and knew their colleagues’ domain.
I’m proud of the work they delivered and they can be as well. The ownership they took, progress they made and product they delivered!