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We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs

lalitm.com

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Re: We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs

#131
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I often just copy the whole core dump, and feed it into the prompt.

And this kids is how one bug got fixed and two more were created

Nope.

Good result == LLM + Experience.

The LLM just reduces the overhead.

That’s really what every “new paradigm” has ever done.

Re: We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs

#132
I introduced this to my old company years ago and called it Big Block of Cheese Day after the West Wing episode [1]. We mostly focused on very minor bugs that affected a tiny bit of our user base in edgey edge cases but littered our error logs. (This was years ago at a, back then, relatively immature tech company.)

It had the same spirit as a hackathon.

[1] https://westwing.fandom.com/wiki/Big_Block_of_Cheese_Day

Re: We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs

#133

I love the idea, but this line: > 1) no bug should take over 2 days Is odd. It’s virtually impossible for me to estimate how long it will take to fix a bug, until the job is done. That said, unless fixing a bug requires a significant refactor/rewrite, I can’t imagine spending more than a day on one. Also, I tend to attack bugs by priority/severity, as opposed to difficulty. Some of the most serious bugs are often qui…

Not sure why would you ever need to refactor for fixing a bug?

Re: We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs

#134

I love the idea, but this line: > 1) no bug should take over 2 days Is odd. It’s virtually impossible for me to estimate how long it will take to fix a bug, until the job is done. That said, unless fixing a bug requires a significant refactor/rewrite, I can’t imagine spending more than a day on one. Also, I tend to attack bugs by priority/severity, as opposed to difficulty. Some of the most serious bugs are often qui…

> That said, unless fixing a bug requires a significant refactor/rewrite, I can’t imagine spending more than a day on one.

The longer I work as a software engineer, the rarer it is that I get to work with bugs that take only a day to fix.

Re: We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs

#136

I love the idea, but this line: > 1) no bug should take over 2 days Is odd. It’s virtually impossible for me to estimate how long it will take to fix a bug, until the job is done. That said, unless fixing a bug requires a significant refactor/rewrite, I can’t imagine spending more than a day on one. Also, I tend to attack bugs by priority/severity, as opposed to difficulty. Some of the most serious bugs are often qui…

> That said, unless fixing a bug requires a significant refactor/rewrite, I can’t imagine spending more than a day on one. The longer I work as a software engineer, the rarer it is that I get to work with bugs that take only a day to fix.

I've found the opposite to be true, in my case.

Re: We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs

#137

I love the idea, but this line: > 1) no bug should take over 2 days Is odd. It’s virtually impossible for me to estimate how long it will take to fix a bug, until the job is done. That said, unless fixing a bug requires a significant refactor/rewrite, I can’t imagine spending more than a day on one. Also, I tend to attack bugs by priority/severity, as opposed to difficulty. Some of the most serious bugs are often qui…

Its odd at first, but springs from economic principles, mainly sunk cost fallacy.

If you invest 2 days of work and did not find the root cause of a bug, then you have the human desire to keep investing more work, because you already invested so much work. At that point however its best to re-evaluate and do something different instead, because it might have a bigger impact.

Likelihood that after 2 days of not finding the problem, you wont find it after another 2 days is higher than starting over with another bug that on average you find the problem earlier.

Re: We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs

#138
post #133

I love the idea, but this line: > 1) no bug should take over 2 days Is odd. It’s virtually impossible for me to estimate how long it will take to fix a bug, until the job is done. That said, unless fixing a bug requires a significant refactor/rewrite, I can’t imagine spending more than a day on one. Also, I tend to attack bugs by priority/severity, as opposed to difficulty. Some of the most serious bugs are often qui…

Not sure why would you ever need to refactor for fixing a bug?

Oh, that's because a bug in requirements or specification is usually a killer.

I have encountered areas where the basic design was wrong (often comes from rushing in, before taking the time to think things through, all the way).

In these cases, we can either kludge a patch, or go back and make sure the design is fixed.

The longer I've been working, the less often I need to go back and fix a busted design.

Re: We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs

#139
post #129

I love the idea, but this line: > 1) no bug should take over 2 days Is odd. It’s virtually impossible for me to estimate how long it will take to fix a bug, until the job is done. That said, unless fixing a bug requires a significant refactor/rewrite, I can’t imagine spending more than a day on one. Also, I tend to attack bugs by priority/severity, as opposed to difficulty. Some of the most serious bugs are often qui…

I think the worst case I encountered was something like two years from first customer report to even fully confirming the bug, followed by about a month of increasingly detailed investigations, a robot, and an osciliscope. The initial description? "Touchscreen sometimes misses button presses".

Thanks.

I love hearing stories like this.

Re: We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs

#140

I’m a strong believer in “fix bugs first” - especially in the modern age of “always be deploying” web apps. (I run a small SaaS product - a micro-SaaS as some call it.) We’ll stop work on a new feature to fix a newly reported bug, even if it is a minor problem affecting just one person. Once you have been following a “fix bugs first” approach for a while, the newly discovered bugs tend to be few, and straight forward…

Would love to work on a project with this as a rule but I am working on a project that was build before me with 1.2 million lines of code, 15 years old, really old frameworks; I don't think we could add features if we did this.

Same. The legacy project that powers all of our revenue-making projects at work is a gargantuan hulking php monster of the worst code I’ve ever seen.

A lot of the internal behaviors ARE bugs that have been worked around, and become part of the arbitrary piles of logic that somehow serve customer needs. My own understanding of bugs in general has definitely changed.

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