Fix It Now or Delete It

Samuel Myles

1. Zero-bug policy
2. Zero-bug scenarios
3. Fix It Now or Delete It ←
4. Zero-bug policy adoption

Fix It Now or Delete It, by Yassal Sundman, introduces the definitive bug management system. It aims to cut meetings, bug management, and other busywork, and ‘start focusing on quality’. She first used this system with a development team in 2013, and later wrote about it, before it escalated to a conference presentation, an infographic, cards, and a web site.

The definitive bug management system

Fix It Now or Delete It defines a system for working with bugs. Not a software system, but a decision framework. In fact, the resulting workflow’s simplicity doesn’t even require a software implementation:

Antoine de St Exupéry’s famous bon mot explains why we call this the definitive bug management system:

La perfection est atteinte, non pas lorsqu’il n’y a plus rien à ajouter, mais lorsqu’il n’y a plus rien à retirer.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

This workflow, also known as a zero-bug policy, has a significant impact on how a software development team works, despite its simplicity.

Cute and slightly humorous

Wikipedia describes how The Little Prince, Antoine de St Exupéry’s best-known work, examines human motivations:

Despite its style as a children’s book, The Little Prince makes observations about life, adults, and human nature.

Similarly, Fix It Now or Delete It features humorous colloquial language and a cute cartoon bug (insect) that make it seem unthreatening, and more accessible than typical management advice. On the contrary, this system requires sophisticated collaboration, in practice.

Software development methodology

Back when I worked as a junior developer, a colleague and I drew a diagram to help our teammates understand our issue handling process. We captured its glorious complexity in a flow chart, and stuck it on the wall. In the decades since then, software development methodology has drastically simplified our development methods, in favour of agility.

Fix It Now or Delete It manifests agility by replacing old-school fixed process and decision rules with conversations. Replacing a fixed process with case-by-case collaboration gives the team more agency to decide for itself how to respond to each bug report. It makes them more agile, in the original sense of the word.

Tough decisions

The software industry continues to struggle with agile software development, because its simplicity makes it difficult to apply. Junior developers, especially, expect to find rules for answering questions and making decisions during development. By contrast, a self-managing team embraces making their own decisions, often with an agile coach to facilitate this unfamiliar responsibility.

Teams that adopt Fix It Now or Delete It face a tough decision for every single bug report, without a complex framework to hide behind. Fortunately, it turns out that if you stick with this approach, and fix bugs instead of ignoring them, you can afford to take each new bug reports as it comes. You may find the decision to fix it now or delete it tough, but at least you only have to think about one bug.