Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-12330013-20160101022123/@comment-24577221-20160202225222

For both new features and bug fixes, there's usually a triage process: since one can't fix everything, because of lack of time and/or people, one chooses the most important things to do. For bugs, the deciding factors are things like the severity of the problem (crash and deletes account?  crash?  annoying?  minor?  barely noticeable even if you're looking for it?)  and how often it happens (every time someone does a regular game action?  only after some unusual combination of actions? only if one does a bizarre combination of things that makes no sense?  only affects a few people who are using some unusual combination of hardware and software?). Also, how hard is it going to be to fix? - major rework of the whole project? correcting for one bad assumption in one code module? one typo?

The worst ones are when there's a catastrophic consequence, but it only happens once in a while (for now, at least) and you can't figure out what combination of factors trigger the problem.

The easy-and-useful ones -- "low-hanging fruit" -- are often given to new people working on a project, a good way of introducing those people to the system they'll be working on. Fixing basic typos, for example. The mine rollover bug would be a newbie bug, since the problem is easily reproduced, well-defined, and limited in scope, and has a fairly obvious cause. To fix it, someone needed to know how the code displayed time values in general, and track things back to that particular case... potentially a good learning experience.

As a deadline approaches, the less-important uncompleted bugs and features are discussed and deferred until later, so the team will have time to finish up the more urgent matters, and the project in its current state is handed off to the testers. "Code freeze" is when you expect that the work is done, and you have a reasonable expectation that the testers won't find any new problems that can't also be deferred. A few years back I commented that we weren't having a code freeze so much as that it was kind of congealing.