Tuesday, October 09, 2018

How bureaucracies get out of control

Recently I had to spend more than an hour to convince some otherwise very smart people that we should not have QA approval to close a bug. Having such an extra step caused developers to refrain from using the type "bug". Instead, they started to use the more generic "issue" type. The result was not being able to see which issues were bugs. For me, bugs are the more important issues to work on. When you label an issue as a bug, you get a nice red exclamation mark to the left of the issue on your board.

My personal experience is that it is quite easy to add something to an existing procedure but 10 times more difficult to remove something. This bias leads to bureaucracy getting larger, more complicated and less useful in time. This is the exact opposite of "perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove" [Antoine de Saint Exupéry]

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