Not all bugs are worth fixing and that's okay • Hacker News Board

Re: Not all bugs are worth fixing and that's okay

#11

Post by joombaga » Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 7:15 PM UTC

betadreamer wrote: post #4

larrik wrote: post #2

"97% of respondents said they practice agile in their organization" Yeah, they all SAY they practice agile, but a lot of them practice waterfall with agile naming conventions.

100%. They think they are doing agile as long as they have Sprints. Startup I'm working at right now told me "Agile" is overkill for us. But ironically it's more iterative then any company I worked before that did sprints.

> "Agile" is overkill for us.

What does this mean/did they mean by this?

Re: Not all bugs are worth fixing and that's okay

#12

Post by yurishimo » Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 7:16 PM UTC

The most important thing I take away from this, is that even if you don't fix the bugs, you should be aware of them and tracking them.

Maybe it is a bug that only affects 1 out of every 10,000 customers. But if you get enough of those it can start to add up. Keeping track of them allows you to go to management with the data to support spending a sprint on bugfixes and code maintenance.

Re: Not all bugs are worth fixing and that's okay

#13

Post by nottorp » Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 7:18 PM UTC

betadreamer wrote: post #4

larrik wrote: post #2

"97% of respondents said they practice agile in their organization" Yeah, they all SAY they practice agile, but a lot of them practice waterfall with agile naming conventions.

100%. They think they are doing agile as long as they have Sprints. Startup I'm working at right now told me "Agile" is overkill for us. But ironically it's more iterative then any company I worked before that did sprints.

Every competent programmer that I know did a form of agile (just the sane parts) long before Agile was a religion.

Re: Not all bugs are worth fixing and that's okay

#14

Post by mnm1 » Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 7:19 PM UTC

The problem is that many organizations don't know how to tell important bugs from non-important ones, don't have proper processes for bugs reported by customers, and generally ignore customers. Here's a couple of popular apps that I have used and the reason I have quit or will quit them: Hulu with the TV package constantly tells me I'm streaming to more than 2 TVs and won't play anything even though I'm not streaming to any. Youtube TV constantly plays the wrong thing when I click something to play. These are egregious bugs that I'm sure I'm not the only one experiencing because they happen on multiple, different mobile devices, tablets, the web apps, etc. The strategy outlined in the article may be viable when customers are not paying anything, but when companies charge an arm and a leg for software (> $40 / month) users expect the software to not have any major bugs like this that prevent its basic functioning. With the type of support offered by such companies, users will be moving on quickly to competitors that hopefully have their basics worked out. I wouldn't use an email program that can't send or receive email and these bugs are on par with that.

Re: Not all bugs are worth fixing and that's okay

#15

Post by gowld » Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 7:39 PM UTC

debt wrote: post #10

Bugs shouldn't happen. Actually, in some critical systems, bugs can't happen. Bugs aren't magic; they happen for a reason. It could be a broken dependency(unsupported versions, fatal bug in a dependency, deprecation, configuration etc.), resource limitation(out of memory, security breach etc.), poor design which leads to poor implementation(logical errors, bad data abstractions). Abstractly waving your hands and sayi…

What if you need features in addition to bugfixes, and you have finite resources?

Re: Not all bugs are worth fixing and that's okay

#16

Post by ken » Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 7:42 PM UTC

larrik wrote: post #2

"97% of respondents said they practice agile in their organization" Yeah, they all SAY they practice agile, but a lot of them practice waterfall with agile naming conventions.

This number sounded suspicious to me, so I downloaded the report. What it actually says is that 97% of organizations practice some level of agile, but the percentage of teams using agile is much lower. The most common response (46%) was "Less than 1/2 of our teams are agile", for example.

Saying that "97% of organizations practice agile development methods" makes it sound like it's overwhelmingly dominant, but it's not even possible to tell from these responses if a plurality of the teams who responded to a "State of Agile survey" use it, or what the most common development methodology is.

This is exactly the sort of contextless figure that you'll find torn apart in "How to Lie with Statistics".

> "JavaScript is more popular than ever, and over 69% of developers use JavaScript

Does anyone really believe that StackOverflow surveys gather a representative sample of all developers? This same survey found that 1 in 6 developers target the Raspberry Pi (more than iOS), and 7.5% use assembly language (more than Go, Objective-C, or VB.NET). It's an interesting survey but take it with a grain of salt.

Re: Not all bugs are worth fixing and that's okay

#17

Post by wristmittens » Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 7:44 PM UTC

Something about this rubbed me the wrong way and I realized it was because this pretends that ignoring much of the long tail of userbase is not only okay but beneficial to the majority. If, say, Quip ignored bugs in IE6 that's likely fine because my parents using their CRT iMac aren't going to be using Quip, but imagine if a crucial app like Gmail ignored older browsers; suddenly all the disadvantaged people that can't afford new laptops lose access to their email.

If it's a bug that 10 users are hitting because they were migrated from an earlier version incorrectly, sure it might be okay not to fix, but if 10 users are hitting it because they're legally blind and using an extraordinarily large font to use your product, it's crappy to say they don't deserve a fix. You have to understand what part of your userbase is hitting a bug and then decide from there.

Re: Not all bugs are worth fixing and that's okay

#18

Post by awalton » Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 7:46 PM UTC

debt wrote: post #10

Bugs shouldn't happen. Actually, in some critical systems, bugs can't happen. Bugs aren't magic; they happen for a reason. It could be a broken dependency(unsupported versions, fatal bug in a dependency, deprecation, configuration etc.), resource limitation(out of memory, security breach etc.), poor design which leads to poor implementation(logical errors, bad data abstractions). Abstractly waving your hands and sayi…

Maybe, but "Words with Friends" doesn't need to be written in Ada with a team of 50 engineers blowing through $20M working on proof systems for verifying the behavior of placing a tile on a board. There's maybe a tiny difference between aircraft control surface stability software and casual video games, as just one tiny example.

So, obviously, as engineers we have to say that it's context dependent - bugs have priorities. And sometimes bugs exist that you can't reproduce in a lab, have only occurred once in history, and you can't even be sure it wasn't some hardware glitch (because, well, hardware is buggy too)... So, the sane and reasonable thing to do is to let those go and spend our time somewhere where we're likely to make considerable and reasonable progress.

Re: Not all bugs are worth fixing and that's okay

#19

Post by wristmittens » Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 7:50 PM UTC

wristmittens wrote: post #17

Something about this rubbed me the wrong way and I realized it was because this pretends that ignoring much of the long tail of userbase is not only okay but beneficial to the majority. If, say, Quip ignored bugs in IE6 that's likely fine because my parents using their CRT iMac aren't going to be using Quip, but imagine if a crucial app like Gmail ignored older browsers; suddenly all the disadvantaged people that can…

Not exactly the same thing but this is a similar idea of using data and algorithms to ignore the disadvantaged.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/books/review/automating-i...

Re: Not all bugs are worth fixing and that's okay

#20

Post by twtw » Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 7:53 PM UTC

wristmittens wrote: post #17

Something about this rubbed me the wrong way and I realized it was because this pretends that ignoring much of the long tail of userbase is not only okay but beneficial to the majority. If, say, Quip ignored bugs in IE6 that's likely fine because my parents using their CRT iMac aren't going to be using Quip, but imagine if a crucial app like Gmail ignored older browsers; suddenly all the disadvantaged people that can…

> crucial app like Gmail ignored older browsers;

Google started telling me some months ago that my browser is unsupported and random stuff has stopped working every few weeks since. I'm running circa 2015 Safari.