I can explain it to you. A bug description at the beginning is some observed behaviour that seems to be wrong. Now the process starts of UNDERSTANDING the bug. Once that process has concluded, it will be possible to make a rough guess of how long fixing it will take. Very often, the answer then is a minute or two, unless major rewrites are necessary. So, the problem is you cannot put an upfront bound on how long you need to understand the bug. Understanding can be a long winded process that includes trying to fix the bug in the process.

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darkwater 7 hours ago | parent [-]

> A bug description at the beginning is some observed behaviour that seems to be wrong.

Or not. A bug description can also be a ticket from a fellow engineer who knows the problem space deeply and have an initial understanding of the bug, likely cause and possible problems. As always, it depends, and IME the kind of bugs that end up in those "bugathons" are the annoying "yeah I know about it, we need to fix it at some point because it's PITA".

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auggierose 6 hours ago | parent [-]

That just means that somebody else has already started the process of understanding the bug, without finishing it. So what?

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darkwater 5 hours ago | parent [-]

So you can know before starting to work on the ticket if it's a few minutes boring job, if it could take hours or days or if it's going to be something bigger.

I can understand the "I don't do estimates" mantra for bigger projects, but ballpark estimations for bugs - even if you can be wrong in the end - should not be labelled as 100% impossible all the times.

	▲	auggierose 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Why did the other developer who passed you the bug not make an estimate then? I understand the urge to quantify something that is impossible to quantify beforehand. There is nothing wrong with making a guess, but people who don't understand my argument usually also don't understand the meaning of "guess". A guess is something based on my current understanding, and as that may change substantially, my guess may also change substantially. I can make a guess right now on any bug I will ever encounter, based on my past experience: It will not take me more than a day to fix it. Happy?