The Mindset

I have a confession: I am not the kind of person who wanders around the house looking for things to fix. Let me rephrase that: I am not the kind of person who fixes things around the house as soon as something breaks. OK, you’re on to me — I hate fixing things around the house! I don’t own any fancy tools, I don’t have 167 types of screws and nails, and you will never catch me trying to build something I can buy. But that’s not the end of it. A couple of months ago the light bulb in our bedroom burnt out. It took me an entire month to buy a new one and replace it.

I know it’s nothing to be proud of. So, why am I wasting your time telling you about my dysfunctional nature? In some sense, articulating your problems aloud is a kind of therapy. But that’s not the real reason for sharing these embarrassing facts. I just wanted to share my perfect excuse with you. You see, I can always find something more important to do.

Here’s the thing: no matter how important or urgent some home improvement chore is, my other tasks are always more important. Can you compare changing a light bulb to writing a chapter in my upcoming book? Is replacing a leaky faucet a match to writing a new blog post?

I guess most of you don’t buy these excuses. My wife doesn’t buy them either. If she had, I would have written this post in the dark, to the sound of endless dripping. So, against my will I eventually find myself wandering around the local hardware store, trying to figure out what is it I need in order to cause as little damage as possible around the house.

Unfortunately, in software development we get away with the exact same excuse much more often. And here’s how it goes. During development many bugs are identified by the testing group. Some of them are very easy to fix. Some of them are severe enough to require an immediate fix. But there will always be some bugs you can live with for the time being. And that’s exactly where things start to go wrong.

The easiest thing you can do with those “we-can-live-with-that-for-now” bugs is to postpone fixing them until the next version. This is a legitimate decision. After all, this is what we have priorities for. And priorities are the key to successful project management. But when that next version is about to be implemented, many of us are tempted to postpone these problem one more time. Fixing those “ancient bugs” always seems less important than implementing a new feature. And thus, almost all postponed bugs will stay unresolved for eternity.

But it gets even worse. The longer you live with the bugs, the harder they become to fix. If by any chance you find yourself forced to fix these problems by a furious customer, there is a good chance no one will remember what it was that caused that strange behavior. By then, you will have piles of new code dependent on your flawed code. Fixing an ancient bug at this stage might be much more dangerous.

So, should you resolve every single bug in your code the minute it is found? Of course not! Prioritizing bugs, and postponing some of them, is a necessity in every project. What you should do, however, is give your bugs a fair chance to be resolved. Your postponed bugs should be treated just like any other task.

Here are a couple of guidelines for treating your bugs fairly:

1. Don’t slander. Don’t be tempted to argue that new features are always more important than fixing old problems. Old problems will always come to haunt you at some point. Getting rid of them is generally a good strategy. The relative priority of bugs and features should be determined on a per case basis.

2. Don’t discriminate. Don’t maintain two separate task queues (one for bugs and one for features). When you plan the next version of your product, you should prioritize new features and postponed bugs in the same queue.

3. Don’t be a stranger. Regularly check your postponed bugs to see how they are doing. If seeing the same bug in your database over and over again becomes too annoying, maybe it’s time you fix it.

4. Don’t be lazy. Fixing a leaky faucet is not much fun, but it is by far better than having a constant drip as the soundtrack of your life.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 17th, 2006 at 1:39 pm and is filed under Planning, Bugs, Project Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.