When planning and prioritizing what is to be included in a release, do you distinguish between bugs, feature enhancements and new features?
For example, do bugs always take priority – do you fix all known bugs before working on new features? Do you use a formal system for comparing the cost vs. value of each change in your backlog? And if so, do you compare bugs and features using the same formula? Is this different for commercial software vs. open source vs. in-house corporate software?
EDIT: Some great responses – thanks. While I had a preconceived opinion that you need to treat bugs, features, enhancements all the same, and simply select the work based on the cost/benfit of each, I think the reality is that this depends on your situation.
This choice is called triage, a term from emergency departments in hospitals where they have to decide who gets treated (and sometimes, unfortunately, who lives and dies).
As with all business decisions, it’s a cost/benefit problem. What is the benefit of fixing a bug or adding a feature? What will it cost (including the opportunity cost of not doing something else)?
Pick those that have the most benefit for least cost. What you’re aiming for is the maximum bang-per-buck. Resources are limited, desires are not, the perennial problem of capitalism 🙂
There’s no point fixing a bug experienced by only one customer who’s never going to throw more repeat business your way if it means a feature that will sell hundreds of copies is dropped in the meantime.
For what it’s worth, our company has a database of requested changes where customers can basically vote for what they want to see in upcoming versions of our products. The actual creation of these requested changes in that database is limited to the sales force since we don’t want all sorts of requests showing up without being evaluated and discussed at least a little bit with the customers.
In addition, we regularly approach our biggest customers (in terms of revenue generated) with the list to figure out what features should be added (they are free to suggest their own desires as well, which also get entered into the database – obviously voting power depends a bit on revenue).
This is quite separate from our bug system although quite often bugs are raised which are actually new feature requests, and they’re shipped across to the new features database. It’s possible that this may even happen for real bugs that are considered low-impact or have a suitable workarounds in place.