It's critical that this is fixed!!!!1!!eleven!!



  • We use TFS for issue tracking. We track both new features and bugs in it, though both are only sometimes there. New features always have Work Item Type = Bug.

    I just executed a query: all issues in project where Severity <> Critical. 300 results. Out of 1750 bugs.

    When I posted about this online, someone suggested:

    This tells me there's something wrong with criticality definitions.

    In my book, "Critical" means a crash of an app or a failure of an essential functionality.

    He was right, of course, that's exactly the definition they use here. Except here:
    • Crash means any unexpected behavior, be it an error message that pops up but doesn't actually cause any problem when using the software or a field that seems to be 2px out of place
    • Essential functionality means anything which is needed to enter data, anything to do with calculations, and anything to do with reports. Which is what our product does: enter data, do some calculations, spit out signed PDFs.

    Oof.



  • @configurator said:

    When I posted about this online,

    Wait, this is a repost? Laaaaaaaame.



  •  Sounds like how things are at my job.  I'm an "analyst" (which here means I do some SQL and muck around in RTF docs for our proprietary software written in Delphi to read), and almost everything is "High" priority in our ticket system, but it's not a really high priority, some things marked "Low" priority are urgent, and I get fielded helpdesk tickets that the network guy(s) should be handling (and which are in our Knowledgebase, just the users don't search at all).

    Just had another one come in when I finished typing this.  LOL.  This happens at least 10+ times a week from various users.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    The solution is to rename "minor", "low", "high" and "critical":

    [ ] If this never got fixed, it wouldn't matter.

    [ ] I can still get my work done, but it's annoying

    [ ] If this was still an issue in a week, I wouldn't be able to meet an important deadline with my boss or our clients

    [ ] I'd be willing to personally phone my boss and get him out of bed/bug him on vacation to discuss this issue.



     



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    The solution is to rename "minor", "low", "high" and "critical":

    [ ] If this never got fixed, it wouldn't matter.

    [ ] I can still get my work done, but it's annoying

    [ ] If this was still an issue in a week, I wouldn't be able to meet an important deadline with my boss or our clients

    [ ] I'd be willing to personally phone my boss and get him out of bed/bug him on vacation to discuss this issue.

     

     

    I like that, but in most environments, there's an even more effective solution: Keep the same rating system, but (quietly) invert the resolution priority.

    The self-important jerks that complain about the report being the incorrect shade of blue will always insist that they have a critical emergency that needs to take priority ASAP. Meanwhile, the meek worker drone down the hall that has to hand-edit a mangled report every week will still be sumbitting tickets that say "when I do ___ the output data gets corrupted, I can work around it, but when you get a chance, can you fix the application, please?"

     



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    The solution is to rename "minor", "low", "high" and "critical":

    [ ] If this never got fixed, it wouldn't matter.

    [ ] I can still get my work done, but it's annoying

    [ ] If this was still an issue in a week, I wouldn't be able to meet an important deadline with my boss or our clients

    [ ] I'd be willing to personally phone my boss and get him out of bed/bug him on vacation to discuss this issue.



     


    You forgot the most important one,

    [ ] OMG! OMG! I can't even describe how bad this is!



  • @Ben L. said:

    @configurator said:
    When I posted about this online,

    Wait, this is a repost? Laaaaaaaame.

    So I'm not allowed to post a single line about my problems in another social network as I run across them, even though no single person would see both posts?



  • @configurator said:

    So I'm not allowed to post a single line about my problems in another social network as I run across them, even though no single person would see both posts?

    Correct. You also owe us $50.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Correct. You also owe us $50.

    No problem. I charge a payment fee of 173.64₪, plus a conversion fee of 5$ + 3%, so you end up owing me 11.28₪. But I think I'll wave that charge because I'm feeling generous today.



  • The RWTF is that Google finds thirty million results for ש״ח and zero for ₪.



  • @Jonathan said:

    The RWTF is that Google finds thirty million results for ש״ח and zero for ₪.

    Even more so because Google clearly knows what ₪ is: https://www.google.co.il/search?q=1%E2%82%AA


  • 🚽 Regular

    We've got a PHB who adds items himself, and considers a single piece of text that happens to be the wrong shade of grey to be something that is going to cause a fissure in the Earth that will swallow the eastern seaboard.

    TRWTF, though, is when people bring up that we've got minor cosmetic changes that no end-user would really care about on the same level as bugs where a certain CPU architecture will cause the app to crash, the PHB says, "Well, obviously just do the bugs that crash first and then do the other critical tasks after that. Duh."

    ARRRRRRGH



  • @RHuckster's PHB said:

    Well, obviously just do the bugs that crash first and then do the other critical tasks after that. Duh.

    This guy shows an unexpected level of common sense. Most would just say
    @Normal PHB said:
    Well, obviously just do all the bugs first. Duh.


  • Considered Harmful

    @RHuckster said:

    "Well, obviously just do the bugs that crash first and then do the other critical tasks after that. Duh."


  • 🚽 Regular

    @configurator said:

    @RHuckster's PHB said:
    Well, obviously just do the bugs that crash first and then do the other critical tasks after that. Duh.

    This guy shows an unexpected level of common sense. Most would just say
    @Normal PHB said:
    Well, obviously just do all the bugs first. Duh.

    That's what he used to do. We finally got to his head that we can't do that, and this is his compromise.



  • @RHuckster said:

    @configurator said:
    @RHuckster's PHB said:
    Well, obviously just do the bugs that crash first and then do the other critical tasks after that. Duh.

    This guy shows an unexpected level of common sense. Most would just say
    @Normal PHB said:
    Well, obviously just do all the bugs first. Duh.

    That's what he used to do. We finally got to his head that we can't do that, and this is his compromise.

    It's simple!

    1. Start a brain-thread for each ticket.
    2. While there are threads left running:
      1. Select a thread arbitrarily.
      2. Work on fixing the ticket for an arbitrary amount of time.
      3. When the time is up:
        1. If the ticket was resolved, mark it as such.
        2. If the ticket was not resolved, discard your work.
      4. Continue with the next arbitrarily chosen thread.
    3. Sweet, sweet death.


  • Oh for deities' sakes. I normally lurk, but this is just too painful to watch.


    Criticality/priority and urgency are not the same thing. How highly you prioritise something will be the factor which dictates the proportion of your resources devoted to it. How urgent something is will tell you when they need to be put on the job.


    Many things are both high-priority and urgent, but others may be high-priority but not urgent, or low priority but only worth doing if done urgently.


    An example of the first type is the classic all-business-stopped major crash. The second type might be something like upgrading the desktop OS for an entire company - it's likely to be the biggest thing an IT department handles in quite a while, but whether it gets finished on Monday or Tuesday in six months time is neither here nor there. The third type would be things like Joe the salesman who'd like a new font installed to use once giving a presentation in a couple of hours - it's not going to make much difference one way or the other, but it's only useful at all if he gets it right away.


  • Considered Harmful

    For either metric, if all work items share the same value, it effectively means that value is undefined.



  • @ffelthc what said:

    Criticality/priority and urgency are not the same thing.

    Criticality and priority aren't the same thing either. Either way, everything is also top urgency, so your entire ramble is irrelevant in this case. (In other cases, I agree, you shouldn't conflate importance and urgency)



  • I wasn't criticising your WTF. More responding to RHuckster and the rest of the discussion. It's a semantic issue, most likely, because it takes a special kind of idiot to give a stupid response to a question they've actually understood; it's far more common to get a stupid answer when someone doesn't understand the question (as the asker intended it to be understood).


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