Linear has a similar policy - https://linear.app/now/zero-bugs-policy
We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs
341–350 of 356 posts
Re: We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
In an ideal world sure, but knowledge gets lost every time someone randomly quits, dies, retires etc. Stuff that’s been working fine for years is easy for a team to forget about, especially when it’s a hidden dependency in some script that’s going to make some process quietly fail.
The OP explicitly said "if you involve all required management", and that is key here. Having a process that is responsible for X million dollar of revenue yet is owned by no manager is a liability for the business (as is having an asset in operation that serves no purpose). Identifying that situation in a controlled manner is much better than letting it linger until it surfaces at a moment of Murphy's choosing. > St…
The basic premise was it’s no longer obvious if a system is still doing anything useful. If the system had easy to locate documentation saying everything that used it then there wouldn’t be an issue, but that’s very difficult to maintain.
Documentation on every possible system that could use the resource would need to be accurate, complete, have someone locate and actually read it, remember, and communicate it with someone in a relevant meeting which may be taking place multiple levels of management above the reader here. As part of that chain when a new manager shows up and there’s endless seemingly minor details, so even if they actually did encounter that information at some point theirs nothing that particularly calls out as worth remembering at the time.
That’s a lot of individual points of failure which is why I’m saying in the real world even well run companies mess this stuff up.
Re: We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. I often just copy the whole core dump, and feed it into the prompt.
I kinda wonder if at some point this is something we might use the LLM more directly for. As in, train them on raw binary dumps as input.
I wonder if we’ll be seeing tools that do this.
I could see Apple or Microsoft, building it into their IDEs.
But, as was noted elsewhere, I think it’s only useful as an advisor. I think a lot of folks look at LLMs as some kind of programmer replacement.
Re: We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
I kinda wonder if at some point this is something we might use the LLM more directly for. As in, train them on raw binary dumps as input.
I wonder if we’ll be seeing tools that do this. I could see Apple or Microsoft, building it into their IDEs. But, as was noted elsewhere, I think it’s only useful as an advisor . I think a lot of folks look at LLMs as some kind of programmer replacement.
They are that too
Re: We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs
#345I 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, eve…
yeah that's fair, didn't mean to argue against them entirely. I've just been in too many environments where fixits or cooldowns or whatever were used in place of good hygiene.
Re: We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sure it has a lot to do with the complexity of the environment but I've fixed three bugs in a day easily. Our software isn't serving millions of people though, it's a cli tool with a few hundred end users.
Good job coloring github squares
Dude I really am fixing real bugs and doing useful work, I've just gotten very good at my job.
Re: We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if we’ll be seeing tools that do this. I could see Apple or Microsoft, building it into their IDEs. But, as was noted elsewhere, I think it’s only useful as an advisor . I think a lot of folks look at LLMs as some kind of programmer replacement.
They are that too
I still wouldn't trust them for a lot of stuff.
Some of the code I get from Claude and ChatGPT is ... not so good.
Re: We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
Next up: a new programming language or methodology that guarantees all bugs take less than two days to fix.
I think this, like many problems, can be reefactored into the halting problem. Which we know how to solve…. Right?
We definitely know how to create a Jira ticket for it, and the rest is developer's problem.
Re: We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs
#349Re: We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs
#350About stopping and fixing problems, did anybody have had this kind of experience? 1. Working on Feature A, stopped by management or by the customer because we need Feature B as soon as possible. 2. Working on Feature B, stopped because there is Emergency C in production due to something that you warned the customer about months ago but there was no time to stop, analyze and fix. 3. Deployed a workaround and created i…
Sounds familiar. The only missing part are the "happy endings" such as:
When you finally complete Feature B, the analysts look at it again, and realize that it actually wasn't necessary, and you should revert it.