June 27, 2006

Puzzling Response to a Bug Report

One person on my team was testing a new Troubleshooting feature, which attempted to rank similar items together on a single page, based on their "relatedness".

The feature had no written requirements at all, and was only recently implemented and deemed "testable".

Some of the results produced by this feature were seemingly unpredictable.

So he wrote an issue report demonstrating what appeared to be totally inconsistent results.

The developer replied this way:
Rankings are not human understandable. Don't try. Operates as designed. Not a bug.
Bear in mind that this was an Architect-level developer, not some Entry-level coder.


When there are no requirements, any solution will suffice.