More happy news from the exciting land of joy that is software engineering!

Today, on our project, we finally implemented a bug-tracking system!  Yay!  Only 1 year 3 months late.  However, of course, it couldn’t be Bugzilla or any of its cohort – after all, only two people on the project have actually got the hang of Subversion; Bugzilla might just be over the limit.

No, we have the Bug Folder.  Not, of course, an electronic folder, but a real one with paper inside.  Many printouts, in fact, of the “Software Problem Report Form”.  (Presumably the word “bug” is too common, or just doesn’t produce such a good abbreviation.)  So, today I generated 5 SPR Forms.  They are wonders to behold:
<ul><li>They have nowhere to actually assign the bug to someone.  So, they just sit in the pile until programmers rifle through them and catch sight of something that they recognise.</li><li>They also have nowhere to mark the bug as fixed.  There’s a

signoff at the bottom – for a manager to sign to say that the bug actually exists.</li><li>And, being as they’re made of paper, they have to stay in the folder at all times to make sure they don’t get lost.  So only one person can look through them at once.</li></ul>Work is fun.