You must log every tiny bug" Sure thing, boss

I work as the only QA in a small software company. For years we had a pretty chill system. If a dev pushed something broken to test, I pinged them on chat with a quick screenshot, they fixed it in ten minutes and we all moved on. Officially we had a ticket system, but for tiny stuff like wrong colors or missing commas nobody cared.

Then we got a new project manager who really loves "process". After sitting with us for one sprint he called me into a meeting and basically told me I was doing QA wrong. According to him, every single issue must be logged as a formal ticket with full steps, expected result, actual result, browser, build number, attachments, the whole template. Even if it is a typo in one label. I tried to explain that this would slow everything down and that the devs prefer quick pings for small things. He cut me off and said, no exceptions, if it is not in the tracker, it does not exist.

So next sprint I followed his rule perfectly. I stopped sending chat messages. Any time I saw something off, I opened a new ticket, filled all the fields, copied version info, recorded little screen captures. A button two pixels to the left of design Mockup Ticket. Placeholder text not centered Ticket. Extra space in "Log in" Ticket. In two days there were more than 70 tickets with my name on them.

Developers were confused, then annoyed, then started tagging the PM on every single one. Our standup turned into a reading of my ticket list. Stories were not getting finished because I was too busy documenting minor stuff to test the big features. After a week the PM finally asked why velocity crashed. I just smiled and said I was following his instruction exactly and that quality requires time.

Next sprint he created a new rule. "Cosmetic issues under five minutes to fix can be handled informally on chat." Funny how that works when the process guy has to swim in his own process.