Why Ignoring Bugs Will Make Your Product Better

Do you have a bug management system with thousands of bugs?

Do you have meetings to review high priority bugs?

Do you argue over how to use priority and severity?

Why?

Bug management is a waste of time.

Bugs fall into three categories:

Bugs that need to interrupt work. These are urgent bugs. You don't need to argue about priority or severity. Both are high. These are the stop-everything-and-fix-it-right-now kind of bugs. You already know how to handle these.

Bugs that need to be scheduled. These bugs don't require an interrupt but they certainly need to get fixed. They can go in the backlog and get prioritized against everything else. But be careful, many of these bugs just seem important in the moment and actually fall into the next category.

Bugs that can be ignored. These bugs can and should be ignored. Most of the bugs you encounter will fall into this category. Now you might ask, how can you just leave known bugs in the product?

Remember, everything is a trade-off. As bugs come in ask, is this bug more important than what you are doing right now? If the answer is no, then ask, is it more important than what you are doing next? If the answer is still no, then you are never going to fix this bug. Stop wasting times managing it.

You might worry, what if i get it wrong? Suppose a bug comes in and you think you can ignore it. Go ahead, do that. If you got it wrong and you shouldn't have ignored it, the bug will come up again. You'll get another opportunity to ask yourself the same questions. And this time around you will have more data. If it never comes up again, then you were right, the bug can be ignored.

You may have a hard time with this. But the reality is you are wasting a lot of time managing bugs that will never get resolved.

Stop managing trivial bugs and focus instead on building a great product.

Do you agree? Disagree? Share your bug squashing strategies in the comments.