Re:Ben Nadel: Only Solve One Problem at a Time
by jiggawatts on Thursday November 10, 2022 @05:10PM
(#33554229)
My corollary to this is that bugs are a sort-of conserved quantity. For every 1,000 real* bugs found, 1,000 bugfixes are required. Bug report in, bug fix out.
The longer you delay fixing bugs, the more concurrent issues are present in the codebase. So then when you add a feature, instead of either having 0 errors or diagnosing a bug in 1 new thing, you now have to diagnose n+1 bugs, where 'n' is the number of unresolved bugs.
The more this is allowed to fester, the worse this becomes, to the point of hopelessness. I've seen a codebase with ~1K open crash bugs, and hundreds of memory corruption bugs. Developers were making things worse and convincing themselves that they were fixing things because randomly the memory corruption was less bad on that test run.
*) To make things simple, just ignore false bug reports for now. Pretend all bugs are real, such as "makes the program crash".
The longer you delay fixing bugs, the more concurrent issues are present in the codebase. So then when you add a feature, instead of either having 0 errors or diagnosing a bug in 1 new thing, you now have to diagnose n+1 bugs, where 'n' is the number of unresolved bugs.
The more this is allowed to fester, the worse this becomes, to the point of hopelessness. I've seen a codebase with ~1K open crash bugs, and hundreds of memory corruption bugs. Developers were making things worse and convincing themselves that they were fixing things because randomly the memory corruption was less bad on that test run.
*) To make things simple, just ignore false bug reports for now. Pretend all bugs are real, such as "makes the program crash".