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Not all bugs are worth fixing and that's okay

blog.bugsnag.com

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

#51

Post by charleslmunger »

This article is strictly true - there are bugs that are not worth fixing. But the process of figuring out which ones are and aren't isn't as simple as crashes/sessions.

There are some categories of bugs that must always be fixed, regardless of how infrequently users run into them - security, privacy, accessibility, data loss.

There are also cases where many low impact bugs all share a common root cause - the value of fixing any one bug is low, but the sum of fixing all current and preventing all future occurrences is high value. Enforced static analysis tools (like error prone for Java) and libraries/frameworks with safety checks (autoescaping template languages, polyfills, etc) are a great way to address these long tail bugs. I generally write a new compiler error after encountering the same bug class three times.

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

#52

Post by btschaegg »

rajangdavis wrote: post #42
ryandrake wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the toughest things I struggled with while transitioning from a larval junior developer to a senior tech lead to a project manager was the fact that (at least in the context of a for-profit business) not all bugs need to be fixed, even the ones you personally think are really really bad. The goal is to make money, not necessarily by producing the most perfect software. The quality bar needs to be high, but the…

Totally understand that a project can't be perfect, and I could be wrong, but I feel that if there are a lot of bugs, the project scope is too big and/or the requirements are not well understood. There is also the matter of really picky customers; however, if a customer can articulate what you are doing wrong, I don't think that it's a bad thing if they are picky. Quality should be in step with expectations; selling…

> [...] I feel that if there are a lot of bugs, the project scope is too big and/or the requirements are not well understood.

Indeed. And I'm under the impression that the project's take on fixing issues (not just bugs!) is a central part of that, which goes against OP's argument somewhat:

Scope/requirements are usually not out of whack because nobody thought about it when the project started (that's a whole other world of bad project management). The fact is that we're not good at all at judging how the scope and the requirements will change in the future. When (not if!) that eventually happens, you cannot just go adding random changes and edge cases forever, or you'll end up with a horrible Rube Goldberg machine no one has ever even a chance of understanding. You'll have to consistently monitor the sanity and accuracy of your model and either choose to limit the scope of the thing you're building or to correct the model for those edge cases you haven't considered, lest you monkeypatch yourself into a corner.

Now, those bugs that cost so much to fix are usually those where your model breaks down. And that, in turn, is where it's necessary to regurarly step back, find out which part of the model doesn't fit reality anymore and how you can fix it. Then, you can make one of the two decisions above. I've seen my fair share of code in projects where that wasn't done properly, and sometimes, only ignorance on the management side can explain the lack of panic regarding that code.

> Quality should be in step with expectations; selling services that can't be achieved with in a specific time slot is worse than trying to fix all of the bugs.

Well said.

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

#53

Post by coldtea »

nowayjose2 wrote: post #45
coldtea wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have a funny feeling that the nontechnical people on my current project would be nodding their heads along to the article, but the truth is that our applications have bugs that 100% of our customers are running into; they simply aren't immediately noticeable to a layperson. That doesn't mean they're not important. If they're not noticeable, and the customers keep buying, despite 100% of them having them, how are…

The bugs will be very noticeable to stakeholders who are not end users, if they decide to look. The users don't buy the software because they want to; they buy it because they are required to. If groups we're supposed to be accountable to see the shenanigans we're up to and say, sorry no dice, you have to try again with some other company that made their software properly, _then_ the users will be upset because they'…

>They refused to let me fix it, not because we didn't have time (there was plenty, and I was otherwise free to work on pretty much whatever was in the backlog), but because fixing the bug would let the customers know that there was a bug in the first place. Some of this data would end up getting passed on to shareholders and the government. Is this not a bug?

No, it's an opportunity to ask for a large sum of money, to leave the company and not talk about it.

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

#54

Post by taejo »

trav4225 wrote: post #25
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…

Something to perhaps consider: if both groups of 10 people are experiencing a bug, especially one not caused by their own doing, why is one group more "deserving" of a fix than the other?

A bad migration can be worked around by a clean install, but blindness can't, so there's one. Legal reasons are another (e.g. the Americans with Disabilities Act).

OT: does anybody know of a site with similar interesting content and discussion to HN, but with a fraction of sociopaths closer to that of the general world population?

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

#55

Post by Retric »

nowayjose2 wrote: post #49
Retric wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agile is not about the details. If you are producing shippable versions of your product every 2 months or less then your probably Agile relative to what existed when the term was invented.

Maybe if you mean little-a agile, as in the dictionary definition "moving quickly". Big-A Agile, as in the set of software development principles, has a bit more to it than that. http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html

Nothing on that list is a specific requirement for a specific methodology. “The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.”

That does not say you can’t have a distributed team. It simply says face to face communication is best.

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

#56

Post by izzydata »

wilun wrote: post #39
izzydata wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dare you to write 100 lines of useful code without a bug in it.

Are you even trying? A random search tells me that "The mean DD for the studied sample of projects is 7.47 post release defects per thousand lines of code (KLoC), the median is 4.3 with a standard deviation of 7.99." ( https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6462687/ ) So clearly if you are careful and use state of the art practices, this is very doable. Not only this is doable, but various individuals and teams in hist…

Those measurements inherently make no sense as you can't know unknown unknowns. Sure, for all intents and purposes if you never encounter a particular defect in a billion years of usage then a bug may as well not exist, but that doesn't mean it doesn't.

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

#57

Post by GoToRO »

kyleperik wrote: post #26

> There’s no such thing as a bug free application This is a stretch. Seems like many people think of code as a living thing that just does what it wants, and us programmers have to beat it into submission. The truth is, there can be bug free applications. The problem I think is the complete opposite of the point of the article. Programmers need time to write good software. Without stopping to fix the things we run in…

I remember the time when people around me started using expressions like "My PC is not feeling good today." feeling

It's about time, it's about having managers that were programmers and not just managers and so on. Bug free is possible for sure.

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

#59

Post by wilun »

izzydata wrote: post #56
wilun wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you even trying? A random search tells me that "The mean DD for the studied sample of projects is 7.47 post release defects per thousand lines of code (KLoC), the median is 4.3 with a standard deviation of 7.99." ( https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6462687/ ) So clearly if you are careful and use state of the art practices, this is very doable. Not only this is doable, but various individuals and teams in hist…

Those measurements inherently make no sense as you can't know unknown unknowns. Sure, for all intents and purposes if you never encounter a particular defect in a billion years of usage then a bug may as well not exist, but that doesn't mean it doesn't.

Those measurements inherently makes more sense than hand-waving; and although mathematically I agree with you, the world is not mathematically pure.

Regardless, I stand that implying that it would be exceptional to be able to write 100 lines of bug-free useful code is ridiculous. I'm not stating that it is easy, nor that most of chunks of 100 lines are written like that. Just that not only this is possible, but this is accessible. Now depending on the field it might be more or less difficult, but in general I suspect there are tons of chunks of 100 lines that have been developed correctly on the first try, and those metrics tends to, non-formally I concede (but if you dig enough what is even formal enough?), weight more in favor of my view point than in favor of the difficulty level being astonishingly high.

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

#60

Post by trav4225 »

taejo wrote: post #54
trav4225 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something to perhaps consider: if both groups of 10 people are experiencing a bug, especially one not caused by their own doing, why is one group more "deserving" of a fix than the other?

A bad migration can be worked around by a clean install, but blindness can't, so there's one. Legal reasons are another (e.g. the Americans with Disabilities Act). OT: does anybody know of a site with similar interesting content and discussion to HN, but with a fraction of sociopaths closer to that of the general world population?

Thanks for the input!

I hope the sociopath comment wasn't triggered by my question. I tend to question widespread assumptions, perhaps more often than I ought to. But I find that, more often than not, people don't have a good reason for the positions they hold. I abhor groupthink which, sadly, dominates our culture today.

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