An interesting dilemma popped up at work today when a coworker filed a bug report on one of the systems my dev team oversees. This nifty little error was the direct result of a previous fix. Yeah, I know, we all fix things and break other things, but hold with me and you’ll get where I’m going.
My company runs in internal framework for whipping up client sites where the tech more or less drops premade text content through a web interface to generate pages. One of the techs noticed that when you save a new page, it puts you back to the screen to add a new page. He wanted to go back to the previous page so he could edit it. Bug filed, handled by me, now it returns you to editing the previous page upon saving.
Well, apparently not all of the techs dug this new system. They wanted to just drop in all of the pages before editing anything, and this “fix” messed up their groove. Today, one of them decided it was high time to file a report about it. So now I have two bugs, dueling for supremacy and the rights to be deemed “the right way”. Of course, I’ll fix it in a way that solves both issues and shuts up both camps, but it goes to show you, one user’s bug is another user’s feature.