Ian Landsman is Starting From Scratch, April 24, 2007:
Heck With Bug Trackers
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This is an interesting idea. I wonder if you could make money selling a bug tracker that disposed of bugs that were older than X or when you reached more than X bugs. I must admit that I have a huge list of feature requests and there’s no way many of them will ever (or should ever) be built. It would be interesting if these just disappeared and left my work area nice and clean with only more relevant feature requests.
Discussion
Makes sense when you're using a bug tracker for more than just bugs. Looking through a long list of feature requests and ideas isn't really motivating. It's like a never ending development cycle...
But I would never want a bug tracker to automatically delete tickets for bugs =P.
Created by Hugh on 04.25.2007 12:15 am
Wouldn't you mind if some automate threw out your unsolved bugs? Really? In other words, are you sure that something isn't important only by checking that it hasn't been fixed by specific amount of time?
I wouldn't be so fast. There are a lot of important features which goes unimplemented from version to version waiting for their slot. Sometimes they're to big to be packed in specific version, sometimes they wait for more some research etc. It doesn't automatically mean that they're worth throwing away.
In one team, to keep the bug tracker clean, we used a version called informally "version never-never." It became a bin where we were putting all those staff that looked no so important at the moment. On the beginning of every version designers were checking issues submitted to version never-never and usually there were some good ideas which were put into development. On the other hand there were also some issues which have become obsolete and they were (manually) thrown away.
Created by Pawel Brodzinski on 04.25.2007 8:40 am
True, but I think it's often true that good ideas often come up over and over. So you may not lose as many as you think. In general though I agree that throwing away ideas scares me a bit. On the other hand it seems like there should be a better way to organize bugs and features beyond the system every bug tracker uses which is just to be a big database.
Created by Ian on 04.25.2007 8:46 am
That article was lame. "Don't track bugs" is just the new "don't write spec" (which was also lame). No dev team in their right minds would want each developer to have his own personal Excel list of bugs.
Created by Christopher Hawkins on 04.25.2007 11:35 am
I don't like that part of it, but don't you think there's something to having to sort through all those things that will never be coded. If you have thousands and thousands of issues, you know they're going to grow old. Often things in the bug db become outdated compared to where the product is and so on.
Created by Ian on 04.25.2007 11:42 am
I don't think the assumption that you'll have to sort through thousands of old bug requests is a valid one, no. If something's not going to be addressed, you change the status to "Won't Fix" and never look at it again.
Created by Christopher Hawkins on 04.25.2007 6:42 pm
The advice given in Getting Real by 37signals says to not track feature requests at all. Instead, just read the feature request email and delete it immediately. The reasoning being that you won't be able to forget the features that you should really implement because they will be brought up over and over by your users. Just a thought...
Created by ADoss on 04.26.2007 9:49 am