launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Jonathan Lange <jml@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 2:28 AM, Robert Collins
<robertc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
...
>
> Firstly, the -vast- majority of our bugs are small niggly things;
> sometimes fallout from changes we've made, things we intended to do as
> part of a project but fell by the wayside - that sort of thing.
>
> I think that many of those bugs (even though they aren't labelled as
> such) would be worth calling tech-debt, and to reduce their occurrence
> we need to be much more aggressive about /not/ context switching with
> the issue still existing.
>

This corresponds well with my own experience.

> Secondly, bugs with 'X should Y' are incredibly incredibly incredibly
> annoying to revisit years later. They usually don't describe the
> observed behaviour, nor why the observed behaviour is a problem; when
> they do describe these things they still very rarely include an
> analysis of the alternative solutions, merely concluding that a
> specific thing makes sense - and years later, our standards, our
> tools, and even the problems we are trying to solve have evolved out
> of sight.
>

Yeah, it's even worse when it's your own bug report :)

...
> Fourth, an astonishing fraction of our bug database are things that
> *cost us time or money*. 6% are tech debt. 2% are tickets affecting
> webops.
>
> This is, to me, confirmation that the current strategy for maintenance
> - focusing on root causes, fixing complexity, test coverage, fragility
> and duplication in the system is entirely sensible.
>

+1

TBH, when the maintenance squad idea came into being, I thought that
they would be targeting this kind of bug.

jml