Bughound was a tool I designed and developed for the TiVo Field Trials team. The Field Trials team was responsible for managing the Alpha (internal TiVo employees) and Beta (external TiVo customers) software testing programs. These groups were tasked with performing various tests on pre-release software and reporting any issues they encountered - including UX pain-points or feature requests. These reports were filed through the Field Trials testing portal. Shortly after I had joined the team, I found that a significant portion of my time was being spent manually copying over report details and device error logs to engineering's bug tracking portal. I decided to build Bughound, a tool that automatically generated initial bug reports and ran analysis on test feedback metrics (e.g., breakdown of issues filed by device, software, day, etc.). The time gained from cutting out these mind-numbing cut-and-paste tasks allowed our team to conduct deeper analysis of the issues and minimize the need for back-and-forth between our team and engineering.

The first implementation of this tool was launched in 2012, shortly after which word got out of a triage tool and various engineering groups outside of the Field Trials department adopted it into their workflow. I transferred departments into the role of UI prototyper, but continued to implement small feature requests and updates as my time permitted. I eventually left TiVo before any major updates were implemented, but a former coworker had informed me that the tool continued to be used by various departments.