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As someone who takes a lot of care to document bugs, I would quit if you did that to my bugs. If something isn't reproducible anymore, fine, close it. But just

As someone who takes a lot of care to document bugs, I would quit if you did that to my bugs. If something isn't reproducible anymore, fine, close it. But just closing stuff that nobody got around to fixing yet is evil.

KingOfCoders 4y ago
Usually people don't quit when I join and are rather happy that problems are solved instead of not solved. I would also not sit at my desk one day, and close all the bugs - but talk to developers, managers, leads, QA and product on how we solve the bug problems together. Slashing the number of bugs in the bugtracker is only one task and people didn't object but agreed to it as a way forward. I created by first bugs 40 years ago, I've created bugs that brought down sites and have been a tech manager for 25+ years learning on the way on how to deal with bugs. From my experience: "fixing yet" this is the problem. It's not "yet" it's "ever". If a company doesn't fix bugs in 6 or 12 months, it's never spending enough time to fix these bugs because new feature development is always more important. With the slashing of the bugs and a different approach to quality (E.g. fix bugs first) I would assume you're much happier that the bugs you report get fixed and developers are happy for your good bug reports than bug reports sitting in a bug tracker who no one acts upon.
- mpol 4y ago
  > ...rather happy that problems are solved instead of not solved. But they are not solved, are they? > With the slashing of the bugs... And it's not slashing bugs, but slashing bug reports. The bugs are still there.
  - everforward 4y ago
    I would say that closing the bugs as WONTFIX is just changing the specs of the application so it's not a bug anymore. E.g. if you've got a bug that emojis cause an endpoint to throw a 500, closing the bug as WONTFIX is akin to just saying that emojis are invalid input to the application. After 6 months or a year, that's how everyone is treating it anyways.
  - KingOfCoders 4y ago
    "But they are not solved, are they?" You might have overseen "and we implement ways to not reach high bug levels again"
lamontcg 4y ago
> But just closing stuff that nobody got around to fixing yet is evil. If nobody is ever going to get around to fixing it, then I'd argue that it needs to be closed. Which isn't to defend blindly closing issues open more than X days, but in a bugtracker I think it needs to be valid to close an issue was WONTFIX when it might be a valid issue, but the code owners are simply never going to budget the time to get around to it in the next 10 years. And the bug will still be there and searchable, and people can find it and see the resolution. It may not be satisfying, but the end result communicates clearly that any fix will need to be externally contributed. Keeping around hundreds of bugs that will never be allocated resources or closed is a drain on the team who is maintaining the bugtracker, they have to periodically go through and curate all those issues, and just looking at the number is fatiguing. The result is usually that people stop interacting with the bugtracker and users really wind up shouting into the void. There seems to be this attitude by users that they can demand that their issues stay open forever, and that the negative impact on the developers is some kind of punishment for them not having the time to address the issue and that it is unfair to just close issues that won't be addressed, but that's a very self-centered perspective on the part of the user, and the developers wind up suffering a psychological death-by-1000-cuts problem that doesn't help the project or anything get done. But that means you need to accept at some point that someone is going to kill your baby that you produced and close an issue and tell you that they're not prioritizing it. But they're communicating that they've made a choice, rather than making that choice anyway while leaving the issue open for multiple years and never doing anything about it because they don't have infinite time to fix everything (and every large codebase will always have more bugs than time to fix them).
- newaccount74 4y ago
  Closing a bug as "wontfix" is very different from "just close all bugs older than 6 months".

KingOfCoders 4y ago

Usually people don't quit when I join and are rather happy that problems are solved instead of not solved. I would also not sit at my desk one day, and close all the bugs - but talk to developers, managers, leads, QA and product on how we solve the bug problems together. Slashing the number of bugs in the bugtracker is only one task and people didn't object but agreed to it as a way forward. I created by first bugs 40 years ago, I've created bugs that brought down sites and have been a tech manager for 25+ years learning on the way on how to deal with bugs. From my experience: "fixing yet" this is the problem. It's not "yet" it's "ever". If a company doesn't fix bugs in 6 or 12 months, it's never spending enough time to fix these bugs because new feature development is always more important. With the slashing of the bugs and a different approach to quality (E.g. fix bugs first) I would assume you're much happier that the bugs you report get fixed and developers are happy for your good bug reports than bug reports sitting in a bug tracker who no one acts upon.

mpol 4y ago
> ...rather happy that problems are solved instead of not solved. But they are not solved, are they? > With the slashing of the bugs... And it's not slashing bugs, but slashing bug reports. The bugs are still there.
- everforward 4y ago
  I would say that closing the bugs as WONTFIX is just changing the specs of the application so it's not a bug anymore. E.g. if you've got a bug that emojis cause an endpoint to throw a 500, closing the bug as WONTFIX is akin to just saying that emojis are invalid input to the application. After 6 months or a year, that's how everyone is treating it anyways.
- KingOfCoders 4y ago
  "But they are not solved, are they?" You might have overseen "and we implement ways to not reach high bug levels again"

lamontcg 4y ago

> But just closing stuff that nobody got around to fixing yet is evil. If nobody is ever going to get around to fixing it, then I'd argue that it needs to be closed. Which isn't to defend blindly closing issues open more than X days, but in a bugtracker I think it needs to be valid to close an issue was WONTFIX when it might be a valid issue, but the code owners are simply never going to budget the time to get around to it in the next 10 years. And the bug will still be there and searchable, and people can find it and see the resolution. It may not be satisfying, but the end result communicates clearly that any fix will need to be externally contributed. Keeping around hundreds of bugs that will never be allocated resources or closed is a drain on the team who is maintaining the bugtracker, they have to periodically go through and curate all those issues, and just looking at the number is fatiguing. The result is usually that people stop interacting with the bugtracker and users really wind up shouting into the void. There seems to be this attitude by users that they can demand that their issues stay open forever, and that the negative impact on the developers is some kind of punishment for them not having the time to address the issue and that it is unfair to just close issues that won't be addressed, but that's a very self-centered perspective on the part of the user, and the developers wind up suffering a psychological death-by-1000-cuts problem that doesn't help the project or anything get done. But that means you need to accept at some point that someone is going to kill your baby that you produced and close an issue and tell you that they're not prioritizing it. But they're communicating that they've made a choice, rather than making that choice anyway while leaving the issue open for multiple years and never doing anything about it because they don't have infinite time to fix everything (and every large codebase will always have more bugs than time to fix them).

newaccount74 4y ago
Closing a bug as "wontfix" is very different from "just close all bugs older than 6 months".