alt Hacker NewsAll of the buggy software projects I've been employed to work on have had some version of this rule.
Usually it's implicit, rather than explicit: Nobody tells you to limit work on bugs to 1-2 days, but if you spend an entire week debugging something difficult and don't accumulate any story points in Jira, a cadre of project manager, program managers, and other manager titles you didn't even know existed will descend upon you and ask why you're dragging the velocity down.
Lesson learned: Next time, avoid the hard bugs and give up early if something isn't going to turn into story points for hidden charts that are viewed by more people than you ever thought.
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I hate this kind of management culture that misuses story points. Story points are supposed to take into account difficulty. So if you spend an entire week debugging a difficult bug, you should’ve accumulated about the same amount of story points as colleagues debugging ten easy bugs.
It's the right lesson because the difficulty of the bug often depends on the dev. For example it might take one dev weeks to figure out that a hang due to a sleep(.001) call within asyncio whereas another can identify it with a glance at the code.
Lesson learned, just avoid the hard bugs, I don’t think that is feasible for most of us!