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Re:Embrace the Grind by fossuser on Friday April 09, 2021 @06:33PM (#26757043)
The author's tactic gives them a good sense of the project, common requests, and bugs over a long time period.

This context is really valuable when reasoning about the product or determining what's important to prioritize.

The issue with the "declare bankruptcy and important stuff will come back" is that you don't actually solve the underlying ruthless prioritization issue and very quickly end up in the exact same position.

You also irritate people that spent time writing up product issues for potentially important bugs by auto closing them (so many important things may not come back), but the bigger loss is that going through all of them gives you solid product historical context.

For what it's worth, the best PMs I know go through the backlog and understand what they're killing when they approach a project that's currently fucked. I think it has a positive side effect of giving them a lot of credibility too (as well as helping them ramp up).

Re:Embrace the Grind by EmptyMoon on Friday April 09, 2021 @07:15PM (#26757348)
I have to agree. There is nothing more demotivating for me than documenting a bug thoroughly, only to have it returned to me two months later as part of a bulk 'we didn't get to this in time' cleanup.

Issues for those teams usually 'best effort' isolation going forward, which compounds the issue.

Re:Embrace the Grind by Too on Saturday April 10, 2021 @03:55AM (#26759787)
Possibly worse is those small bugs that would just take a few hours to fix but never get prioritized, yet they still get pulled up for discussion week after week during whole team grooming-meetings. "what is this bug again?" Accumulating a total of more admin-time than solution time.
Re:Embrace the Grind by pixl97 on Friday April 09, 2021 @08:26PM (#26757809)
A bug left alone long enough grows from an child bug to an adult bug. You're still caring, feeding, and maintaining that bug the entire time.
Re:Embrace the Grind by mrec on Friday April 09, 2021 @09:54PM (#26758271)
I think the oldest bug I've raised that's still open is this Webkit one from 2008 [1]. It still gets plaintive comments from various people every few years. A few more and it'll be going off to college.

[1] https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22261

Re:Embrace the Grind by edoceo on Friday April 09, 2021 @10:11PM (#26758359)
> We are fixing in Blink (c2103)
Re:Embrace the Grind by mrec on Friday April 09, 2021 @10:37PM (#26758463)
That's no help for Safari. Personally I haven't needed to care about Safari in half a decade, but presumably others still do.
Re:Embrace the Grind by greggman3 on Friday April 09, 2021 @10:38PM (#26758469)
And yet this is what several open source projects do, including VSCode. They've even automated the process. If there's no action on a bug for X amount of time it's auto-closed.
Re:Embrace the Grind by spurgu on Friday April 09, 2021 @07:35PM (#26757470)
Yeah if you're deleting bugs older than 2 weeks then they're just gonna resurface and you're gonna have to classify them later, in an ongoing process lasting however many weeks. Might as well instead grab the bull by the horns and get the beast tamed right here and now.
Re:Embrace the Grind by dragonwriter on Friday April 09, 2021 @11:02PM (#26758583)
> Yeah if you're deleting bugs older than 2 weeks then they're just gonna resurface

I mean, maybe not—you might lose the users impacted by the bug. Which from a company PoV is probably a loss, but depending on how broken incentives are may not be for the dev team.

Re:Embrace the Grind by rufius on Friday April 09, 2021 @09:33PM (#26758160)
I can see it cut both ways.

I won’t argue that my way is the only correct way because I’m certain it’s not.

Something I didn’t make clear in the very brief description I gave was that, yes, capturing context of what was there is important.

That said - the two projects I worked in where we did this were filled with bad bugs (a separate and problematic issue).

Nothing really replaces spending time with users. That’s what I tend to opt for - figuring out what sucks in their experience and iterate on that.