What You Should Have Asked Your Teachers About Underestimating Bullet Issues

Bullet issues… Each IT project has tasks of this type. They are small, simple, but once you forget about them, something gets killed suddenly.

Many teams underestimate bullet issues. From a developer’s perspective, such a task looks too simple to care about it. So the developer prefers to put it aside and focus on the bigger tasks that look more important.

Let’s have a look at a real-world example:

A dialogue between developers

- Tom, have you seen that ticket saying that you need to remove the photo of one of our founders from the website? It has been on the backlog for three days already. Could you fix it?

- My tests have fallen, I will fail the sprint if I get distracted. Do it yourself.

- Well, I also have a ton of sprint-related tasks. Okay, we’ll get to it later.

A dialogue between stakeholders

— Well, I have already told you that you need to officially rename your team of developers into a gang of sleepy sloths. That is why I decided to quit. They cannot even remove my picture from the website. I even failed my interview in the CoolFinTechStartUp.ai because of that darned picture. They didn’t believe me that I am no longer with the company!

That is how a bullet task killed a team consisting of two developers and one project manager. We grieve. We remember them.

Conclusion

Every team needs to have a couple of interns or junior staff members taking care of such small but critical “bullet” issues. That will not end in losses or anyone’s departure.

Previously published at https://maddevs.io/blog/bullet-issues-tasks-that-kill/