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You’ve never wasted a few minutes on whether a ticket was “critical” or merely “high?” or truly a blocker?

nerdponx 4y ago
I certainly have, but I have rarely regretted spending the time to prioritize my work before starting my work and/or discussing the same with my team. Like pretty much all work of all kinds, there is variance in how long it takes and how effective the outcome is per person-minute.
- docandrew 4y ago
  Exactly, there’s a fine line between prioritization and bikeshedding.
- watwut 4y ago
  These categories on ticket have little to do with me prioritizing my work. There are thousands tickets in each of those categories. >spending the time to prioritize my work before starting my work and/or discussing the same with my team And in the past, I did regretted opening unnecessary discussions quite a few times. I learned not to do it, because it ended in endless bike shedding or conflicts and there were no special gained insights. Turns out, I can do trivial decisions by myself.
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    This seems like a highly dysfunctional state of affairs. Maybe I've never worked at an organization big enough to suffer from this kind of thing.
robertlagrant 4y ago
> You’ve never wasted a few minutes on whether a ticket was “critical” or merely “high?” or truly a blocker? Calling "deciding on how to spend your time" a waste of time seems a misnomer.
- watwut 4y ago
  But ... that person is not deciding how he will spend time. He is deciding which labels to put on ticket. What he will do is not directly related to that.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    What's a priority but a way to decide what to do next? The fact it's stored as a label on a ticket doesn't seem particularly relevant.
    - watwut 4y ago
      It is a way to categorize tickets. It somehow influences what is going to be done next, but it is only one of many factors. One project manager in our company started to actually use it for prioritization, the higher the priority the sooner it was done. Soon after, literally everything ended to labeled critical.
      - nerdponx 4y ago
        People shouldn't be able to label their own bugs/features' severity or importance. They should be able to label it with severity or importance to them, and the team responsible should be allowed to triage accordingly.
    - JoeAltmaier 4y ago
      Absolute priority quickly becomes washed out - everything gets shoved to one end of the range. A useful priority scheme might be, insert the ticket in the list of open tickets by urgency and importance. Something like that, that you can actually make arguments about and compare.
      - ryandrake 4y ago
        Almost every software company I've ever worked with had this insidious "priority inflation" that couldn't be stopped. It works like this: We start out with some sensible definition of priority for bugs: P3 = nice-to-have, P2 = low-priority-but-ship-blocking, P1 = emergency-fix-this-now. Bug intake goes on for a while under this system. Some bug filers don't feel their P3 or P2 bugs are getting worked on, so they "promote" those bugs to P2 and P1. That'll show those engineers my bug is important! Now we seem to have more and more P1 emergencies going on, and the team is struggling to just get through those. Nobody knows which ones are actual emergencies, and which ones are just "somebody being passionate about a bug". Soon, we get an actual pants-on-fire production emergency. This emergency is more urgent than any P1, so we call it P0! Now we finally have a way to mark real emergencies, because the bug database is now overflowing with P1s. Soon people realize they can deem their favorite bugs as really-really-important, so they promote them to P0. Eventually, the database is now overflowing with P0s, and nobody knows what's really urgent. Then another real pants-on-fire production emergency happens...
theamk 4y ago
If ticket priority does not matter, then why do you care? Set them all to single priority and don't think about it. If priority does matter, then why "waste"? Lets say you get rid of tickets.. then your statement becomes: "You've ever wasted a few minutes on whether a bug you found is worth mentioning in release notes? Or if it truly should cause revert of deployment?" When said this way, doesn't seem like "waste" to me, rather a regular part of the job. If the person working the bug doesn't know how bad it is, then who does?
- swiftcoder 4y ago
  > If ticket priority does not matter, then why do you care? Because when you have a ticket priority system, there is often someone external who cares deeply about ticket priority. And reporting requirements around ticket priority. And metrics about ticket priority over time. If you've never been pulled into a meeting with Comms and Legal to discuss retoractively whether a (completed) ticket should have been labelled High or Severe... count yourself lucky
commandlinefan 4y ago
> whether a ticket was “critical” or merely “high?” or truly a blocker Wait until they start adding additional categories like critical blocker, high blocker, severe blocker, exceptionally severe blocker, etc. etc.
- fourseventy 4y ago
  Infinity blocker, infinity + 1 blocker
- cratermoon 4y ago
  Now apply that category soup to tracking both priority and severity.

I certainly have, but I have rarely regretted spending the time to prioritize my work before starting my work and/or discussing the same with my team. Like pretty much all work of all kinds, there is variance in how long it takes and how effective the outcome is per person-minute.

docandrew 4y ago
Exactly, there’s a fine line between prioritization and bikeshedding.
watwut 4y ago
These categories on ticket have little to do with me prioritizing my work. There are thousands tickets in each of those categories. >spending the time to prioritize my work before starting my work and/or discussing the same with my team And in the past, I did regretted opening unnecessary discussions quite a few times. I learned not to do it, because it ended in endless bike shedding or conflicts and there were no special gained insights. Turns out, I can do trivial decisions by myself.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  This seems like a highly dysfunctional state of affairs. Maybe I've never worked at an organization big enough to suffer from this kind of thing.

robertlagrant 4y ago

> You’ve never wasted a few minutes on whether a ticket was “critical” or merely “high?” or truly a blocker? Calling "deciding on how to spend your time" a waste of time seems a misnomer.

watwut 4y ago
But ... that person is not deciding how he will spend time. He is deciding which labels to put on ticket. What he will do is not directly related to that.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  What's a priority but a way to decide what to do next? The fact it's stored as a label on a ticket doesn't seem particularly relevant.
  - watwut 4y ago
    It is a way to categorize tickets. It somehow influences what is going to be done next, but it is only one of many factors. One project manager in our company started to actually use it for prioritization, the higher the priority the sooner it was done. Soon after, literally everything ended to labeled critical.
    - nerdponx 4y ago
      People shouldn't be able to label their own bugs/features' severity or importance. They should be able to label it with severity or importance to them, and the team responsible should be allowed to triage accordingly.
  - JoeAltmaier 4y ago
    Absolute priority quickly becomes washed out - everything gets shoved to one end of the range. A useful priority scheme might be, insert the ticket in the list of open tickets by urgency and importance. Something like that, that you can actually make arguments about and compare.
    - ryandrake 4y ago
      Almost every software company I've ever worked with had this insidious "priority inflation" that couldn't be stopped. It works like this: We start out with some sensible definition of priority for bugs: P3 = nice-to-have, P2 = low-priority-but-ship-blocking, P1 = emergency-fix-this-now. Bug intake goes on for a while under this system. Some bug filers don't feel their P3 or P2 bugs are getting worked on, so they "promote" those bugs to P2 and P1. That'll show those engineers my bug is important! Now we seem to have more and more P1 emergencies going on, and the team is struggling to just get through those. Nobody knows which ones are actual emergencies, and which ones are just "somebody being passionate about a bug". Soon, we get an actual pants-on-fire production emergency. This emergency is more urgent than any P1, so we call it P0! Now we finally have a way to mark real emergencies, because the bug database is now overflowing with P1s. Soon people realize they can deem their favorite bugs as really-really-important, so they promote them to P0. Eventually, the database is now overflowing with P0s, and nobody knows what's really urgent. Then another real pants-on-fire production emergency happens...

theamk 4y ago

If ticket priority does not matter, then why do you care? Set them all to single priority and don't think about it. If priority does matter, then why "waste"? Lets say you get rid of tickets.. then your statement becomes: "You've ever wasted a few minutes on whether a bug you found is worth mentioning in release notes? Or if it truly should cause revert of deployment?" When said this way, doesn't seem like "waste" to me, rather a regular part of the job. If the person working the bug doesn't know how bad it is, then who does?

swiftcoder 4y ago
> If ticket priority does not matter, then why do you care? Because when you have a ticket priority system, there is often someone external who cares deeply about ticket priority. And reporting requirements around ticket priority. And metrics about ticket priority over time. If you've never been pulled into a meeting with Comms and Legal to discuss retoractively whether a (completed) ticket should have been labelled High or Severe... count yourself lucky

commandlinefan 4y ago

> whether a ticket was “critical” or merely “high?” or truly a blocker Wait until they start adding additional categories like critical blocker, high blocker, severe blocker, exceptionally severe blocker, etc. etc.

fourseventy 4y ago
Infinity blocker, infinity + 1 blocker
cratermoon 4y ago
Now apply that category soup to tracking both priority and severity.