We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs
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Re: We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs
#2I firmly believe that this sort of fixit week is as much of an anti-pattern as all-features-all-the-time. Ensuring engineers have the agency and the space to fix things and refactor as part of the normal process pays serious dividends in the long run.
eg: My last company's system was layer after layer built on top of the semi-technical founder's MVP. The total focus on features meant engineers worked solo most of the time and gave them few opportunities to coordinate and standardize. The result was a mess. Logic smeared across every layer, modules or microservices with overlapping responsibilities writing to the same tables and columns. Mass logging all at the error or info level. It was difficult to understand, harder to trace, and nearly every new feature started off with "well first we need to get out of this corner we find ourselves painted into".
When I compare that experience with some other environments I've been in where engineering had more autonomy at the day-to-day level, it's clear to me that this company should have been able to move at least as quickly with half the engineers if they were given the space to coordinate ahead of a new feature and occasionally take the time to refactor things that got spaghettified over time.
Re: We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs
#3I firmly believe that this sort of fixit week is as much of an anti-pattern as all-features-all-the-time. Ensuring engineers have the agency and the space to fix things and refactor as part of the normal process pays serious dividends in the long run. eg: My last company's system was layer after layer built on top of the semi-technical founder's MVP. The total focus on features meant engineers worked solo most of the…
As I pointed out in the "criticisms" section, I don't see fixit weeks as a replacement for good technical hygiene.
To be clear, engineers have a lot of autonomy in my team to do what they want. People can and do fix things as they come up and are encouraged to refactor and pay down technical debt as part of their day to day work.
It's more that even with this autonomy fixits bugs are underappreciated by everyone, even engineers. Having a week where we can address the balance does wonders.
Re: We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs
#4We did this ages ago at our company (back then we were making silly Facebook games, remember those?)
It was by far the most fun, productive, and fulfilling week.
It went on to shape the course of our development strategy when I started my own company. Regularly work on tech debt and actively applaud it when others do it too.
Re: We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs
#5I've never understood why bugs get treated differently from new features. If there was a bug, the old feature was never completed. The time cost and benefits should be considered equally.
Re: We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs
#6I've never understood why bugs get treated differently from new features. If there was a bug, the old feature was never completed. The time cost and benefits should be considered equally.
If the bug affects 1 customer and the feature affects the rest, is the old feature complete?
It's not binary.
Re: We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs
#7I've never understood why bugs get treated differently from new features. If there was a bug, the old feature was never completed. The time cost and benefits should be considered equally.
Bugs can get introduced for other reasons besides “feature not completed”.
Re: We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs
#8I wanted to take a look at some of these bug fixes, and one of the linked ones [1] seems more like a feature to me. So maybe it should be the week of "low priority" issues, or something like that.
I don't mean to sound negative, I think it's a great idea. I do something like this at home from time to time. Just spend a day repairing and fixing things. Everything that has accumulated.
Re: We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs
#9I've never understood why bugs get treated differently from new features. If there was a bug, the old feature was never completed. The time cost and benefits should be considered equally.
until we develop a way for MBA's with spreadsheets to quantify profit/loss w.r.t. bugs, it will never be valued.
Re: We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs
#10189 bugs in one week. How many employees quit after that?