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Sometimes it pays to stay in bed on Monday, rather than spending the rest of the week debugging Monday’s code.

--Christopher Thompson

A friend of mine running an XP project got empirical numbers indicating that some large fraction of the project's bugs were associated with check-ins after 4pm. So he made a rule: no check-ins after 4pm. Result: a whopping decrease in the rate of new bugs.

YMMV.




I know you said YMMV, but wouldn't it be expected that the rate of new bugs would remain close to constant while their peak occurrences shift to earlier in the afternoon? It's just moving a "deadline" back.


This may be the case, but it might also turn out that the team is no longer checking in rushed and untested code as they hurry to get out of the office and go home for the evening. Instead, the may just hold off on checking in the code until the next morning, at which point they've slept on it and possibly thought about some edge cases they should test further, etc.


This was exactly my friend's theory of what happened.


Interesting, I'd always suspected that but never got around to tracking what times bugs were "created".




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