Blast those bugs away

Lidor Wyssocky’s blog "The Mindset" has a great article (pretty small post though) titled 'Give those bugs a chance'. The crux of this article is that, low priority bugs tend to slip off he radar on a regular basis - and this is exactly the beginning of problems.

The easiest thing you can do with those “we-can-live-with-that-for-now” bugs is to postpone fixing them until the next version. This is a legitimate decision. After all, this is what we have priorities for. And priorities are the key to successful project management. But when that next version is about to be implemented, many of us are tempted to postpone these problem one more time. Fixing those “ancient bugs” always seems less important than implementing a new feature. And thus, almost all postponed bugs will stay unresolved for eternity.

But it gets even worse. The longer you live with the bugs, the harder they become to fix. If by any chance you find yourself forced to fix these problems by a furious customer, there is a good chance no one will remember what it was that caused that strange behavior. By then, you will have piles of new code dependent on your flawed code. Fixing an ancient bug at this stage might be much more dangerous.

The solution he suggests is

Prioritizing bugs, and postponing some of them, is a necessity in every project. What you should do, however, is give your bugs a fair chance to be resolved . Your postponed bugs should be treated just like any other task

Read the whole post here.