One of my greatest decisions ever (in my view, anyway) was on a project I managed a few years back.

Under pressure, and no time to waste – sounds familiar, I know – all we could do is produce more bugs. I asked the test team lead to assign testers to developers, to sit with them on their development machine to go over the different scenarios in the software. This was not even on a proper build – just to see that at least in high level, things worked as expected.

Soon enough builds got stable, bug count lowered, and the developers got out of the “babysitting” mentality into “we’re doing a better job” mentality.

I can’t take full credit for this (I was more of a persistent catalyst), but this method is currently being employed in another project by another team. Same pressure (maybe bigger), but at least they are starting to stabilize.

This is painful at the beginning. Apart from having a babysitter (which is sending a message of “I don’t trust you” if miscommunicated, which I’ve done), the process raises bugs early, in front of the developer’s face. So if not done properly,

But more communication is better, and flagging issues sooner is better. It will work for them, as long as they keep going like this. Good luck!