At work, does your team develop new features while there are still open bugs?

[ltcmelo]

If you mark "depends on the bugs", would you mind specifying what aspects you consider?

[MrViggy]

Yes, we do. Our codebase is so large, and diverse, if we were to stop to fix all of the bugs, we would never have time to develop new features, and loose customers left and right.

Viggy

[boudino]

I think it strongly depends on the team structure and the quality of project management. If there are capacities (free developers) and the project is well managed, bugs and features can be processed together.

[Arjay]

Generally most bugs are classified by severity and priority. It's common for both to have a numeric ranking with a 1 being the most important (highest priority or greatest severity). The low end of the scale usually is a 4 or a 5 depending on the organization (lowest pri and sev).

P1/S1 bugs are usually fixed asap. P5/P5 bugs are never fixed (JK).

In terms of bugs, it's reasonable to have a P1/S5 (an example of this would be high profile typo bug). Similarly, it's possible to have low priority, high severity bug (such as a crashing bug that is unlikely to ever get hit by a customer scenario).

Given these classifications, it's perfectly reasonable to develop new features with open bugs.

[BigEd781]

Like Arjay said, we do not ship with active P1 - P3 bugs. However, there are all sorts of lingering P4 and P5 bugs out there that will most likely never be fixed. It is not worth spending time on those at the expense of adding value to the product.

[MrViggy]

P1/S1 bugs are usually fixed asap. P5/P5 bugs are never fixed (JK).
Actually, we do have a "Never Fix" category in our bug tracking system. There are those bugs, that you will never fix because (a) customers have a 0.001% chance of hitting them (and you have a workaround), or (b) they are in "soon to be obsolete" pieces of code.

Viggy

[RaleTheBlade]

At my company, we don't even have a "Priority/Severity" bug database. Were such a small company that whenever a bug is found my boss usually just lets me know and I fix it there on the spot irregardless of its severity. I hope to change that in the future by playing a role more suited to project lead so we can get this whole thing organized. But in a company of about 12 people it isn't feasible at this time, we don't even have a dedicated tester on board yet :(

[dglienna]

Same. Apps go thru test processes, by partner/user. Lots of bugs get fixed immediately, but they all get fixed before upgrades go out