Bug Management: Auto expire defects.
In a previous post, I was proposing to assign a time value to defects and have them expire automatically after a while. As a disclaimer, obviously it would be useful to extend the life of a defect if desired. The rationale behind this falls on two points.
First if a defect stayed untouched for a long time (and assuming it still exists at that time) it is likely to be benign and somewhat irrelevant to the end users of the system. They would otherwise have raised the visibility of this issue (assuming that communication channels are available for them to do so, but that is a different problem).
Second if the code base is being modified actively, it is likely that some of the analysis, the steps to reproduce the defect and how it manifests itself have changed. It could also happen that the defect has become completely invalid, either because it was fixed, belonged to an area that has been removed or thoroughly re-factored or that the focus of the product has changed (remember we are in an Agile environment).
We should let our defect tracking system be our memory. Let our defect tracking be forgetful of unnecessary details to make sure it provides us access to the important things.
What do you think ? Do you often go through older bug reports ? What are you using them for ?
February 11th, 2009 at 7:32 pm
That’s one way to do it.
Are your users involved in managing the list of bugs?
If they were the sole owners of the list, you would only care about the top items of the list, down to a threshold. The threshold is determined by
(1) the things that must be done for the health of the system (your P1s, but probably not P2s) and
(2) the capacity for bug fixing that your Product Owner has requested for the next iteration and that the team has committed to (but being at least whatever it takes to address (1))
César.
February 14th, 2009 at 1:31 am
The idea behind this is to avoid wasting time going over endless lists of irrelevant bugs. The time would be better spent going over the list of new features.
Autoexpire would ensure only fresh bugs are prioritized.