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Comment by eob | Hacker News Reader

My guess it's just the emergent behavior that results when a company doesn't provide developers time to fix bugs.

If their week is already booked full just trying to keep up with the roadmap deadlines, a bug ticket feels like being tossed a 25lb weight when you're drowning.

You could say: "but have pride in your work!"

But if your company only values shipping, not fixing, that attitude doesn't make it through the first performance review.

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What I've found to be most effective for program management is to set aside a maintenance team separate from the feature teams. The roadmap is then planned without counting anything for the maintenance team and they deal with bug tickets as they come in. Rotate the assignment periodically so that every developer has to occasionally spend a few months on the maintenance team.

Doesn’t this lead to problems like the feature team pushing buggy code and having no accountability or responsibility to deal with it?

My preference is to treat the defects like feature work, size and plan. Yes you might not get all the feature work done but the team is accountable for everything they make

There's a lot more to effective program quality management than I can explain in a comment here. Forcing all developers to rotate through the maintenance team is one incentive not to ship crap because they might end up having to deal with it anyway. But more importantly you have to shift left the quality assurance and control activities to minimize the risk of defect leakage in the first place. And set up a closed-loop system where any leaked defect triggers a rigorous root-cause analysis that results in further process improvement.

You’ve just described AGILE development, a way for product owners to backlog code rot while empowering developers to feel like they have a say in things.

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