How would you persuade engineers and product owners to prioritise bugs and features that go beyond acceptance criteria?

This question is taken from the AMA about quality beyond correctness, and comes from Emily O'Connor.

When advocating for certain bugs to be fixed or features to be implemented, I really like to highlight the impact.  What difference could it make to someone's life if we were to implement this?  How could we be causing harm to people by failing to fix this?  How might doing this help us to stand out from our competitors and grow our user base?  In the past, I've even written internal documentation on "user impact stories".  A small set of short stories demonstrating the difference in impact if we were to implement / fix something vs leave it untouched.  They key is to focus on real-world consequences and inspire human empathy.

On the other side of that, I've also used the question of impact to advocate for not fixing / implementing certain things.  Here, not only do I highlight the absence of any positive impact, but also the negative impact of spending time, energy, and other resources on thing A, meaning that thing B and benefit B will not be realised in the next x period.  Implementing thing A could even reinforce poor or inefficient processes which lead to more losses in the long term, and it's important to shine a light on that too.

Thanks for your question, Emily!

Find all the questions and answers to this AMA in the AMA About Quality Beyond Correctness collection.