alt Hacker News>Once you realize that the lack of a feature is the same as the presence of a bug then "fixing all bugs" also means "adding all the features", then you also accept that you will never be done.
This doesn't make sense at all.
Your email software mangles my email. Or your media player randomly skips. That's a bug. No big philosophy needs to be hidden behind it. That your media player doesn't have the shuffle feature is not a bug. It's just an item on a wishlist.
>If you have a bug to fix to weigh against a feature to add, which do you pick?
Depends on the seriousness of the bug. If your disk backup software corrupts backups, I'd fix that, I wouldn't go add schedulled backups or encryption first.
If what you meant to say is that bugs and features are both items to prioritize when deciding work, sure. But they're not the same thing and are not hard to tell apart, so the metaphor doesn't work.
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There are things that are clearly bugs and clearly features. And a lot of things that are somewhere in between. It’s not black or white and as such perhaps not worth categorizing?
Especially with dramatic processes like ”always fix all bugs before implementing any feature”.
My read was they were not saying they’re actually, literally, the same, but for the purposes of prioritization there’s no point in differentiating feature from bug when you use the same “how does this impact my products value to users” as the deciding factor for what gets scoped.
It’s an interesting insight but I’m also not sure it’s valuable in practice. Sort of like “we’re just bags of chemicals that tricked rocks into thinking”.
When you're trying to prioritize work, bugs and features are the same - they're both demands for developer time. I don't think they were saying anything more than that.
You want to say that they're not the same kind of work? True. And yet, when you're allocating work, that doesn't particularly matter.
Grandparent is onto something. You can't define correctness without a spec. And since most business-oriented software, which most of us work with, isn't made against a comprehensive spec, you can argue that anything falling outside it is either a bug or a feature. 'If your disk backup software corrupts backups' has behind it a clean definition that's (pretty) unambiguous and you don't care about, since it's already outsourced to some cloud solution. But 'User finds it easy to buy more stuff' does not.
Also, mandatory Sussman reference [0], where he talks about correctness not being that important and gives Google as example, that just needs to be close enough and not disastrously incorrect + interesting stuff around engineers confusing brittleness with correctness.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HB5TrK7A4pI