Too Important to Fix Bugs?

Think about the role you play in development. do you write new code or do you fix bugs?

It's a trick question! Every developer's role should including fixing bugs. We created them and we should take responsibility in fixing them too. The notion that a developer is so important creating new code that they don't have time to fix their own error is ... well... to say the least, problematic on so many levels. It's a problem with the company, project and the code that is written.

The notion that developers that fix code are not at the same level of those assigned to new features is backwards. Those that fix bugs have a very difficult job. They:

Do not have as much knowledge about the code as the original author.
Work in a wide variety of code written by multiple developers and styles.
Should not break any other code.
Do not get to refactor code but have to fix the code in place with the current design. Even if that design is the problem.
Make the product and other developers look good.
Can have some of the most complete knowledge of the project as a whole.

I once had a developer that was acting as QA on some code say they where "just being an A@@Hole like QA and finding bugs".

To which my reply was "You mean like finding what we did wrong?".

The bottom line is that we should :

Fix out own errors.
Count our blessings every day that we have QA and people that are good at fixing bugs.

Comments

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