Pet Bug

A bug which you have allowed to live long enough to give a name.

You mean like "Visual Basic" or "Windows"

Well, actually, I think what is meant is some kind of a KnownBug?, a very special kind, creating those thoughts in the developer's mind:

Very often, these are just DisplayBugs?. Maybe not spelling errors (those hardly count as bugs) but problems with the presentation of data or the like, leading to the thought of "I know that it's incorrect what's displayed here, so it's currently okay" in the developer's mind. If it persists long enough, you tend to give it a name. You don't say "that bug that leads the stateInfo-method print "(null)" instead of the level 2 stage if it was immediately preceded by the level 3 stage" anymore but just call it the "null-stage-bug".

Our team had a well-known bug called "fish-sticks".

Just as long as it doesn't become a SacredCow.

There's a more sinister form of PetBug: a known issue in someone else's product that won't be fixed (for budget, resource, or political reasons), which one can use as a standard way to denigrate the product or the team that created it. "Oh, he worked on Foomatic--that's the project that still doesn't homogenize flurbles correctly? *pained sigh* No wonder he would say that."

There's also a very un-sinister form, for instance, those that are merely pet peeves of e.g. QA people or something. Often some grammar proof-reader (or color scheme designer or obsessive-compulsive-whatever) will mark issues as (blinking letters, flaming red, 42 point font) PRIORITY 1, SEVERITY 1!!! which automatically stops product release, when it's actually just spelling "it's" as "its" or something similarly trivial, but it holds up everyone and everything until some VP can be gotten hold of to override this nonsense, but of course, since it's a PetBug for them, they just do the same thing again on the next similar topic.

That was a poor choice of example, if you ask me. The difference between "it's" and "its" is the way I decide whether somebody knows what they're talking about or not -- MikeAnderson

Or maybe that should be considered completely different than the page topic. Sure can be annoying, though. These kinds of people are great for finding problems, but my theory is that they should never be allowed to choose the severity/priority level.

A tip to put on another page: A Bug's "Severity" belongs to JustaProgrammers. They know which kinds of crashes will risk hardware or bioware. A Bug's "Priority" belongs to the CustomerTeam. So the XpBillsOfRights? apply here. Advise the severity, and fix in order of priority. DifferentiatePriorityAndSeverity

CategoryAntiPattern

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