Saturday, March 15, 2014

Bug Tracking Etiquette

As our project has grown from to a decent size, we have ended up making some minor mistakes and creating small bugs here and there. An issue which we are having to learn how to deal with is figuring out how to track all these bugs so that they don't get lost in the shuffle. The solution is simple of course, a bug tracker. Thankfully our repo management has a built in bug tracker that we have started to use.

More interestingly is the etiquette for bugs in code. Recently I discovered a trivial bug in a section of code that a teammate was responsible for creating. I thought that I understood his code well enough to make the change myself, but I hesitated on actually implementing the change. It occurred to me that changing another persons code, when that person is active on the project could be considered some how inappropriate. Instead of fixing the issue, I could just have easily opened a ticket in our bug tracking system for him to fix it, but then I must wait for him to notice the ticket, and take time to fix the problem. Neither of these alternatives is inherently better than the other, but it is an interesting dynamic that I had not encountered before.

I supposed the right answer on how to manage this stuff is very project and person dependent. It is surprising how much peoples interactions with each other and feelings play into software development. It is much more than just writing code in emacs.

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