How Fernway moved forty engineers in a week and cut its open bugs by 82%
Fernway's six product teams had outgrown a tracker nobody wanted to open. They moved to Tern in five days, and two cycles later their open bugs were down by four fifths.
- to move 40 engineers
- 5 days
- open bugs, in two cycles
- 212 → 38
- a week back for each lead
- 3 hours
The problem
By the start of 2026 Fernway had 212 open bugs, most of them reported by hotels through support and copied into the tracker by hand. Leads spent Friday afternoons cleaning the board so it was right for Monday's planning, and it was wrong again by Tuesday.
“We moved forty engineers over in a week. Nobody asked for the old tracker back, and our bug queue is the shortest it has been in two years.”
The move
Fernway moved one team first, the one with the longest bug queue. The importer brought across two years of issues and comments in eleven minutes. The other five teams followed over the next four days, each after a 30-minute walkthrough with Tern's support team.
- Day 1: the Bookings team, and the importer
- Days 2 to 4: five more teams, one walkthrough each
- Day 5: the old tracker set to read-only
What changed
Triage rules now send hotel reports from Zendesk straight to the team that owns the feature, with the hotel's plan as a label. Duplicates are merged before anyone works on them. Statuses come from pull requests, so the Friday clean-up stopped.
Two cycles later the bug queue was down to 38. Leads got back the three hours a week they had spent on the board, and the Monday planning meeting is now twenty minutes.
What is next
Fernway is one of the first teams in the Tern Agents beta. The Bookings team gives agents its smallest bugs, the ones with clear steps to reproduce, and reviews about a dozen pull requests a week.