Features and bugs

Published on 22 June 2013.

Today’s thought is about features and bugs.

It is quite common that we categorize our work as either implementing a new feature or fixing a bug. However, when I read about the ZeroMQ project, I learned about a different approach. They view all their work as fixing problems. They make no distinction between features and bugs.

If users of our software can not work the way they want, they have a problem. If we can fix that problem by making some changes to our code, then we have provided some value. It doesn’t matter if we would categorize the change as fixing a bug or implementing a feature. The important thing is that we fixed a problem and provided value.

This approach appeals to me.

The change log of a project like this shows a bunch of things that we can do with the program that we couldn’t do in the previous version.

When end users read a change log, is it important to them to know what bugs were fixed and what new features were implemented? I don’t know. But probably not.


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