Focused bug-fixing weeks like this really help improve product quality and team morale. It’s impressive to see the impact when everyone pitches in on these smaller but important issues that often get overlooked.
We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs
41–50 of 356 posts
Re: We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs
#42I just had a majorly fun time addressing tech debt, deleting about 15k lines-of-code from a codebase that now has ~45k lines of implementation, and 50k lines of tests. This was made possible by moving from a homegrown auth system to Clerk, as well as consolidating some Cloudflare workers, and other basic stuff. Not as fun as creating the tech debt in the first place, but much more satisfying. Open source repo if you…
I would be weirdly happy to have a role whose entire job was literally just deleting code. It is extremely satisfying.
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Re: We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs
#43One nice thing if you work on the B2B software side - end of year is generally slow in terms of new deals. Definitely a good idea to schedule bug bashes, refactors, and general tech debt payments with greater buy in from the business
Re: We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs
#44This is weird to me... The way I learned the trade, and usually worked, is that bug fixing always comes first! You don't work on new features until the old ones work as they should. This worked well for the teams I was on. Having a (AFAYK) bug free code base is incredibly useful!!
I'd love to see an actual bug-free codebase. People who state the codebase in bug-free probably just lack awareness. Even stating we 'have only x bugs' is likely not true.
>I'd love to see an actual bug-free codebase.
cat /dev/null .
Re: We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs
#45This is weird to me... The way I learned the trade, and usually worked, is that bug fixing always comes first! You don't work on new features until the old ones work as they should. This worked well for the teams I was on. Having a (AFAYK) bug free code base is incredibly useful!!
This is the 'Zero Defects'[1] mode of development. A Microsoft department adopted it in 1989 after their product quality dropped. (Balmer is cc'd on the memo.) 1. https://sriramk.com/memos/zerodef.pdf
As opposed to the current 100% defects approach they seem to have adopted.
Re: We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs
#46In my experience, having a fixit week on the calendar encourages teams to just defer what otherwise could be done relatively easily at first report. ("ah we'll get to it in fixit week"). Sometimes it's a PM justifying putting their feature ahead of product quality, other times it's because a dev thinks they're lining up work for an anticipated new hire's onboarding. It's even hinted at in the article ('All year round, we encourage everyone to tag bugs as “good fixit candidates” as they encounter them.')
My preferred approach is to explicitly plan in 'keep the lights on' capacity into the quarter/sprint/etc in much the same way that oncall/incident handling is budgeted for. With the right guidelines, it gives the air cover for an engineer to justify spending the time to fix it right away and builds a culture of constantly making small tweaks.
That said, I totally resonate with the culture aspect - I think I'd just expand the scope of the week-long event to include enhancements and POCs like a quasi hackathon
Re: We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs
#47This is weird to me... The way I learned the trade, and usually worked, is that bug fixing always comes first! You don't work on new features until the old ones work as they should. This worked well for the teams I was on. Having a (AFAYK) bug free code base is incredibly useful!!
I'd love to see an actual bug-free codebase. People who state the codebase in bug-free probably just lack awareness. Even stating we 'have only x bugs' is likely not true.
Top commenter's "AFAYK" acronym is covering that.
The type that claims they're going to achieve zero known and unknown bugs is also going to be the type to get mad at people for finding bugs.
Re: We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs
#48This is weird to me... The way I learned the trade, and usually worked, is that bug fixing always comes first! You don't work on new features until the old ones work as they should. This worked well for the teams I was on. Having a (AFAYK) bug free code base is incredibly useful!!
Depending on the size of the team/org/company, working on anything other than the next feature is a hard sell to PM/PO/PgM/management.
I've had to inform leadership that stability is a feature, just like anything else, and that you can't just expect it to happen without giving it time.
One leader kind of listened. Sort of. I'm pretty sure I was lucky.
Re: We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs
#49How did you not get fired?
Re: We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs
#50> We also have a “points system” for bugs and a leaderboard showing how many points people have. [...] It’s a simple structure, but it works surprisingly well.
What good and bad experiences have people had with software development metrics leaderboards?