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EngineeringCulture4 min read
The bug nobody fixes
Every team has one — a known bug that's been in the tracker for years, that nobody is wrong for ignoring, and that nobody is right enough to fix.
Open any sufficiently old issue tracker. There it is: the bug filed two years ago, with three duplicates, occasional comments, and no owner. Every engineer who's looked at it has decided not to fix it. Every PM who's seen it has decided not to prioritize it. It just sits there.
Why these bugs persist
It's almost never that they're hard. It's that they sit in the seam between two teams, or in code nobody owns, or in a flow that only matters to customers who don't complain loudly. The fix is small. The decision to fix it is missing.
What to do
- Once a quarter, do a bug-sweep day. Close the ones that don't matter. Fix the ones that do.
- If a bug has been open for a year, the answer is either fix or close. Anything else is theater.
- Assign ownership of the seams between teams — not just the teams themselves.
A bug that nobody owns belongs to whoever cares enough to fix it.