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August 19, 2005
Bug scrubbing
The latest colorfully ironic technical term* to come to my attention at work: to scrub a bug. It means doing what you have to do in the bug tracking system to move the bug out of the "nobody responsible has even looked at this yet" state, to a state where although nobody responsible has actually looked at the problem in question yet, the bug report appears to show that somebody accountable has taken it around their neck. That is, for a scrubbed bug the bug report identifies a throat to choke if the excrement hits the air conditioning.
Bug scrubbing is closely related to hog washing, an utterly useless occupation undertaken primarily for the benefit of people observing from far enough away and only in such circumstances that they may indeed think pigs are mostly pink and fuzzy instead of covered head to hoof in grime most of their lives.
* We have lots of colorfully ironic (Orwellian?) management terms. In fact there are so many of them with half lives so short that Rob and Luke filled so much of their whiteboard they had to start erasing terms to be able to work.
Posted by Mark at August 19, 2005 07:42 AM