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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

#3
post #2

"97% of respondents said they practice agile in their organization" Yeah, they all SAY they practice agile, but a lot of them practice waterfall with agile naming conventions.

Or they practice not having any process and say it's agile because they constantly context switch...

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

#4
post #2

"97% of respondents said they practice agile in their organization" Yeah, they all SAY they practice agile, but a lot of them practice waterfall with agile naming conventions.

100%. They think they are doing agile as long as they have Sprints.

Startup I'm working at right now told me "Agile" is overkill for us. But ironically it's more iterative then any company I worked before that did sprints.

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

#6
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. The business relies on complying with the rules of third-party organizations and the software is blatantly violating those rules right now. The clients are aware but still choose to prioritize new features over fixing the bugs that are creating these compliance issues. If we're caught out by those third parties before the bugs are fixed, there's a good chance it could sink the whole company. But our users don't "see" these bugs so they're not considered a priority over new products, new features, or anything else marketing might want.

I looked up Pinedo's background and she's not a developer; she's a social media manager. This is kind of what I figured because her perspective on development seemed really out of whack to me. There are many kinds of bugs that can't be measured with a simple stability calculation, and IME there are definitely error states that are worse than death (crashes). Plus 97% of teams are definitely not following agile principles. Every dev team I've ever been on said it was agile, and most of them just meant that there was a kanban board and something that vaguely approximated a sprint.

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

#7

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. The business relies on complying with the rules of third-party organizations and the software is blata…

It's not exactly related to your post but remember that Agile != Sprints

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

#8

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. The business relies on complying with the rules of third-party organizations and the software is blata…

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.

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

#9
Good article. It reminds me of Sandi Metz's treatment of well-designed code as a business proposition: the goal is to save money, because a good design makes changes cheaper.

It makes sense to consider the cost of having a given bug vs the cost of fixing it. Of course, such estimates will almost always be hand-wavey.

I would also say that when in doubt, fix it. A bug is, by definition, the software not doing what it's expected to do; I think it's better to make fewer promises and keep them. A user who encounters a bug loses trust in the software, and there's a tipping point where they abandon it. You might not know where that is.

You also might not realize what a bad day it could give someone, even if they're only one person. Eg, if you're an email platform and you have a bug that drops one email in a million, that might seem OK. But if missing that email gets someone evicted...

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

#10
Bugs shouldn't happen. Actually, in some critical systems, bugs can't happen.

Bugs aren't magic; they happen for a reason. It could be a broken dependency(unsupported versions, fatal bug in a dependency, deprecation, configuration etc.), resource limitation(out of memory, security breach etc.), poor design which leads to poor implementation(logical errors, bad data abstractions).

Abstractly waving your hands and saying "we can't fix all bugs" doesn't feel right. Identify the underlying cause of the bugs and address that.

One solution is to reduce dependencies, increase resource allocation, and rely on a less rigid design. As a business grows, dependencies will increase, resource allocation will increase and the design will become more complex.

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