The Sad Graph of Software Death (tinyletter.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Programmers, raise your hand if you've been on a project where bugs keep piling up, management doesn't dedicate time to fix them, and the whole thing eventually bogs down. Gregory Brown summarizes that situation in one simple little graph from an issue tracker, and discusses why so many companies have problems with it. "This figure tells a story that is no way surprising to anyone who has worked on software projects before: demand for fixes and features is rapidly outpacing the supply of development time invested, and so the issue tracker is no longer serving as any sort of meaningful project planning tool. In all but the most well-funded, high functioning, and sustainable businesses — you can expect some degree of tension along these lines. The business side of the house may blame developers for not moving fast enough, while the developers blame the business for piling work on too quickly and not leaving time for cleanup, testing, and long-term investments. Typically, both sides have valid concerns, but they don't do an especially good job of communicating with one another." What methods have helped you deal with situations like this? What methods haven't helped?

Comments

Re:Obvious, really

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

You're skipping the part where the project was understaffed in the first place, requirements were ill-defined and ever-changing, and the final arbitrary, unrealistic, pie-in-the-sky delivery deadline date (the ONLY immutable thing in the whole goddam project) was pulled out of someone's ass. Oh. And the devs got pulled away on occasion to fix hair-on-fire bugs in projects they worked on previously (or even better: had no experience with).

Got it good

[JBMcB]

Thanks for these headlines - reminds me of how good I got it. My manager is a former developer. I have, maybe, two or three hours of meetings a week. The issue list is planned out every Monday - if something high priority comes in, something gets taken off the list. If anyone starts monopolizing my time he fends them off or clears the schedule.

I have an acquaintance who went to work for a huge web company (not that one, the other one.) He's a pretty experienced developer, so he grilled them on their development process during the job interview. All the right things were said. They were all lies. He quit after two weeks.

Here's what should happen but doesn't

[the_Bionic_lemming]

I was handed a problem where SQL couldn't handle the parameters in code from a product that wrote code in a convoluted way. It took me two weeks to handle it, but the fix I eventually pushed out made sure that the issue would never happen again.

Despite the fix working for about ten years now, I never got an apology for being punished over the fix taking more than the nitwit manager saying it would take to fix.

If you want code teams to fix stuff right, make sure that the code guy is a manager. If you want someone to blow smoke up your ass and punish people that fix things promote suckup people that have no idea on how to code, or hire h1b's.