Coping with Ask Mode and Bugs

Team System shepherd Jeff Beehler provides some great insight into the nature of ‘Ask Mode’ and why at some point you need be more critical of the bugs you choose to fix, and those you chose not to fix, in the run-up to shipping software.

Ask mode: New reason to postpone bugs?

As a response to my latest post about Team Foundation entering ask mode, TAG responded asking if this was:
One more reason to postpone *BUGS* ?
This simple comment really got me to thinking. As such, I thought I’d spend a little time explaining my view on this. This of course is not a problem unique to Team Foundation or Microsoft…it affects every single software team that ships software for a living. This is because in a sufficiently complex software product, fixing a bug introduces the risk of introducing another. So, at some point, near the end of the project, you have to ask yourself if the problem you’re fixing is sufficiently bad to justify the possibility of introducing another problem just as bad or worse.