Weekly Journal
WK-029
The Week Two People Fixed the Same Bug
Differently, and both correctly
Week
Duplicated work
The same defect was found and fixed twice in one week by two people who did not know the other was looking. Both fixes were right; only one could be kept.
The Defect
A date rendered in one format on one page and another format two pages away.
The Two Fixes
One made both pages call a shared helper. The other made the second page match the first by hand.
The first is better. The second was finished two days earlier, and had already been read by someone who then wrote a third page copying it.
What Was Kept
The shared helper, and a note explaining why the hand-matched version was removed — because without the note, the third page's author would have been left to work out on their own why their model had vanished.
What It Cost
Two days of duplicated work, and one conversation that should have happened before either fix started.
“Both fixes worked. That is the expensive kind of problem.”
Week note
The waste was not the second fix. It was that nobody said out loud what they were working on, and a week is exactly long enough for that to go unnoticed.
Week
- Defect
- One date, two formats.
- Fixes
- Two, independent, both correct.
- Kept
- The shared helper.
- Cost
- Two days.