Reasons For Not Fixing Bugs
07Sep07
I found myself arguing against fixing bugs today. This isn’t a situation I find myself in often. Our release is in 3 days and there were 80 or so bugs in total. From a pure tester point of view not fixing bugs feels like the worst possible sin in the world. As a manager who has to
help ship software it doesn’t feel so bad (anymore) 
Here are some reasons I gave for us to stop fixing unimportant bugs.
- We have to ship software that we know works!
- We don’t want to assume the risk of causing regressions
- We don’t have enough time to go back and test the product thoroughly
- We don’t want to assume the risk of causing regressions
- We don’t have enough time to go back and test the product thoroughly
- We need to focus in the areas that are currently broken without worrying about fixing unimportant areas.
- We don’t want to work overtime to test the fixes and spend time opening new bugs.
More Context – 6o of these bugs were the Priority 3 kind. The kind that when we get to the end of the release we usually say "We can live with that – move it to the next release". we have 3 priority levels 1, 2 and 3. We don’t have severity. The P3 bugs were the ones I didn’t want to be worked on and checked in as they weren’t crucial to the release
Can you think of more reasons?
A good thinking exercise would be to go through and make a list of reasons TO fix bugs. (This
is the side of the fence i’m usually on so this list should be easy for me )
)
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Filed under: Software Testing | 7 Comments
<i>it doesn\’t feel so bad (anymore)</i> – a breakthrough!
What is the statistical chance that <i>any</i> of the p3 bugs will <i>ever</i> get fixed? If it is 0 for any of them, toss them into the know-about-but-have-decided-not-to-do-anything-about bucket.In discussions like this, the Rumsfeld quote comes in handy. The message is that there are known "knowns." There are things we know
that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things
that we now know we don\’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns.
There are things we don\’t know we don\’t know. So when we do the best we
can and we pull all this information together, and we then say well
that\’s basically what we see as the situation, that is really only the
known knowns and the known unknowns. And each year, we discover a few
more of those unknown unknowns.Issues in the bug system are the known knowns, areas that the developer thinks <i>might</i> be affected by a change are the known unknowns, but the accidental interactions (due to technical or design debt) are the unknown unknowns. Those are what kill release dates.-adam
It is unlikely to impact any users is also a good reason to not fix a bug. It is less risky to ship with obscure known defects than introduce defects that you can\’t find in time which could impact users. Although it sounds bad, dot releases are such a given anymore that if it is something that isn\’t a huge issue, generally it can wait for an update.
Also, "likely to impact most users" is a good reason to fix something even if it seems pretty minor. Truncated text may not be of much priority, but if it impacts every user in every language it just looks awful. It bothers me when software will fix a very unlikely scenario because it crashes in a severe situation but will ignore a simple cosmetic fix which would improve the user experience for every user. As you can tell, I really worry about the direction in software testing and the distance that we are getting from the people who use the software. A really cool technical bug which might make us proud that we found or be the most interesting to fix is not always the bug that users will notice.
It\’s me from
http://blog.testyredhead.com
p.s. I found an interesting bug adding my comment here. Ha! And if this posts I also know the workaround.
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