alt Hacker NewsIt must be part of the normal process. If the normal process leaves things like this to "some other time", one should start by fixing the process.
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> If the normal process leaves things like this to "some other time", one should start by fixing the process.
Adding regular fixits is how they fix the normal process.
This addition recognizes that most bug fixes do not move the metrics that are used to prioritize work toward business goals. But maintaining software quality, and in particular preventing technical debt from piling up, are essential to any long-running software development process. If quality goes to crap, the project will eventually die. It will bog down under its own weight, and soon no good developer will want to work on it. And then the software project will never again be able to meet business goals.
So: the normal process now includes fixits, dedicated time to focus on fixing things that have no direct contribution to business goals but do, over the long term, determine whether any business goals get met.
Say you are working on a banking system. You ship a login form, it is deployed, used by tons of people. Six months later you are mid-sprint on the final leg of a project that will hook your bank into the new FedNow system. There are dozens of departments working together to coordinate deploying this new setup as large amounts of money will be moved through it. You are elbows deep in the context of your part of this and the system cannot go live without it. Twice a day you are getting QA feedback and need to make prompt updates to your code so the work doesn’t stall.
This is when the report comes in that your login form update from six months ago does not work on mobile Opera if you disable JavaScript. The fix isn’t obvious and will require research, potentially many hours or even days of testing and since it is a login form you will need the QA team to test it after you find another developer on your team to do a code review for you.
What exactly would you do in this case? Pull resources from a major project that has the full attention of the C suite to accommodate some tin foil Luddite a few weeks sooner or classify this as lower priority?