Every bug becomes equally important over time
I was going to give some naff advice about “consider all common use-case scenarios very carefully before assigning a priority to a bug” before my left brain kicked in to tell me that “As the number of users of a product increases, so too does the number of use-cases. Every bug becomes equally important over time, as enough use-cases develop that intersect with the bug.” What led me to this was the following: I can finally consider switching to Firefox. Firefox 1.5 in particular. The reason? They’ve just fixed a bug that has prevented me switching. Essentially, if you navigated to a URL, and for whatever reason you couldn’t get the page loaded, a blank page would result (and an error dialog). The problem was that you couldn’t discover the URL of the page that you were trying to visit after the error.My browser usage pattern is to use tabs. I read a page, it may have several links I’m interested in, and so I open them on separate tabs and continue reading. When I’ve finished with my current tab, I kill it, move on to the next, and repeat. So if some pages don’t load…well, I’ve lost them. And that is unacceptable. It was also inevitable - until recently I lived on a 56k modem - timeouts, congestion, whatever. So now I can finally consider switching from Safari.What’s interesting is that this was not a show-stopper bug. But it was for me. It was probably not very interesting, technically, nor did it impact on many other aspects of Firefox. But it interrupted my usage pattern. It was a show-stopper for my common use-case scenarios.
June 21st, 2006 at 3:03 pm
Great post, Jon. I never stopped to think that a “small bug” might be a huge one in someone else’s case. The same applies to functionality of an app. As you know, I’ve recently switched to Mac and had to spend time looking for OS X equivilents of a lot of apps I used on Windows. This led to me looking for applications with very particular functionality, and if an application lacked a certain feature (no matter how “minimal” it may be) that was integral to my workflow within that application type, I skipped over it and looked for the next app. IM, FTP, Text Editor, etc.
February 13th, 2007 at 8:26 am
I might agree that even minor bugs become major bugs as the user community expands. However, I’m really thrown by the thesis that “every bug is equally important over time”. I used to be the manager of the emergency support team for a telecommunications equipment supplier. One of our emergencies was when, due to a bug, 999 (or 911) capability stoped working for a UK operator. It took us some time to fix it and I later found out that a man had a heart attack and the call to the ambulance didn’t get through. My management told me that it was a severe coronary and he would likely have died anyway. However, 15 years later I still wonder if we had worked a bit faster or smarter, maybe he would have lived. So I have a hard time accepting that all bugs are equal.