When I got married, and my husband and I moved into our new home, we had a bulletin board near the kitchen for random stuff. One of the first things he posted was photocopied cartoon drawing of a bug, shaped kind of like the huge ditch roaches we used to get in Houston. Head was up, six legs sticking out, solid black body. I think it was smiling. As I said, cartoon. Underneath the drawing it said, “BUG.” OK. I get it.
The drawing next to it was identical in every way except the bug was all dressed up, though there was no change to the external outline of the bug. I don’t remember if it had on a tux or a pinstripe suit, but it looked really dressy. I think it had a top hat in one front leg. It was smiling. Underneath the drawing it said, “FEATURE.”
Huh?
I studied it and still didn’t get it. Being a seeker of knowledge, I asked. He said, “A feature is a bug that has been documented.” What? He repeated it. So we ended up having a technical discussion about features in the hall. My initial reaction was “How unprofessional. Document the bugs but don’t fix them?” He gave me all the whys and wherefores. How huge projects have multiple programmers and sometimes the separate parts don’t play nicely with each other. How you fix the big things first, and the less important things later or not at all.
I understand a lot more about software development than I did 25 years ago. I even work in that field now as a QA tester. But you know what? I still think most “features” should be corrected before the software is released into production.