Ask my wife how forgetful I am. You’ll probably get a big sigh. Case in point; the other day we were on our way home and we were about 30 seconds away from turning onto the side street we live on. My wife said to me “don’t forget that we need to go to the grocery store.”
“Yes dear”
30 seconds later.
“Why are your turning onto our road! We need to go to the grocery store!”
Yes, I can be that forgetful. I know that I’m forgetful and so I have systems in place to help myself with this. I try to write things down and use software to remind of things when I can. I might be an extreme case, but I think we all forget stuff sometimes. It happens in software development as well. This is why we have stories, and documentation and defects.
However, sometimes I want to forget things. Take bugs for example. Having a big bug backlog just slows us down and I don’t want to go through it every week or two and see at the things we haven’t fixed. So what can I do to make bugs more forgettable?
Well let’s consider a few ideas:
I could fix it myself. Who says only developers can fix bugs? Sometime I know how to fix it myself or can figure it out with a bit of work, so why don’t I just do that?
I could immediately work with a developer to fix it. Instead of filing a bug and sticking it in some backlog, I could chat with a developer who know that area of the code and see if we can sit down and figure out the issue and fix it on the spot.
I could work with PM to make into a story for the back log. Sometime a bug doesn’t have to be a bug and can just be prioritized with other work we are doing
I could walk away. Maybe this bug is ok to ignore. Maybe I can just embrace my forgetfulness, look the other way, and go find something more important to fix or work on.
Of course sometimes a bug does need to be remembered, but wouldn’t it be nice to be able to forgot about them more often?
Photo by AbsolutVision on Unsplash
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