Things undone

Occasionally I feel bad about all the things left undone.

In software development, there are two things we routinely do that occasion such feelings. (Ooops, I’ve been told I’ve been using the word ‘feel’ too much.) We use ticket-tracking systems, and we write TODO comments.

Ticket-tracking systems are a way to keep track of work to be done and the evolution of the product. A ticket is a short, detailed description of an action to be taken to improve the product. They come in different types: bug, improvement, feature, task, etc. The description is action-oriented and specific, and assumes the current product as the context (at least the best tickets are like that; maybe I’ll talk a little more later about less-than-best tickets). Here’s a decent-looking example of a ticket. I could go on for quite a while about the good and the bad of ticket-tracking systems… For now, the salient points are:

  • a ticket represents some work to be done
  • tickets are assigned to someone, to do the work
  • as a developer, you spend time daily looking at the list of tickets assigned to you

TODO comments are a simpler manifestation of a similar idea. When writing code, you might see room for improvement in some particular technical aspect, but you don’t have the time to tackle it right now. So you put a little TODO comment in there explaining what you think might be improved. Here’s a little contrived example:
[python]
if n == 0:
print "none"
elif n > 0:
print "some"
# TODO: what if n is negative?
[/python]

In this case, I can see that the set of all numbers is not covered by the two conditions, so I’m led to wonder whether I should be handling the case where n is negative. Now, if I really thought that case was going to arise naturally and soon, I’d figure out how to handle it and write the code. But in this example, I’m thinking: it could happen, but I can’t see any reason it should. Let’s say n is the count of apples in the box from the apple-counting machine. No reason for that to be negative. But, ya know, it could be, somehow. So I note that I feel uneasy about leaving that case uncovered. Later, when browsing through the code or debugging it, I might see that comment, and due to an increased understanding of the world or an abundance of spare time or something, I’ll decide to cover the case. Maybe I learned that the apple-counter counts a zucchini as -1 apples, and somehow a zucchini gets in the box occasionally.

Where tickets and TODOs can get depressing is when you look at your list and realize that there are 30 tickets on it, 10 of which are more than a year old, and 23 of which you’ve been systematically ignoring for a long time. Or you run across a TODO and a scenario flashes through your mind, where the improbable thing happens, and the resulting chain of causality ends with a lawsuit in Taiwan.

It might be easy to say “Well, this simply should never happen! These tasks should be dispatched with great haste and with all available resources!”. Certainly one can imagine a process or organization where that is the rule, and buildups of old cruft never happen. But follow me for now into my world: in the places where I’ve worked, there is no such rule, and the cruft does build up. I’ve left jobs with dozens of tickets and TODOs left in my wake, where they either evaporated when I left or are still lurking around somewhere today.

The rule in these places is more like “Good ideas should be captured immediately and dealt with when there’s time”. That’s a perfectly valid rule to use, but it does tend to lead to a situation where there are lists of lots of good ideas left unattended. If you believe in good ideas and you want to perfect your work, then these lists sometimes look pretty grim, numerically speaking. There are always more good ideas than time to implement them, by a laaarge factor.

So, you learn to live with the backlog.

One comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.