In one of our company meetings, not sure if it was a division or not since I've been reorg'ed more times than I can countr last year, the VP made a good point when discussing the quality of some of the releases. "It's easy to break, but tough to fix". That got me thinking.
I've been in the situation where I have written a defect and sent it through the proper channels, with all the information needed to debug and reproduce and then sit back thinking, "that's is an easy one, it'll be simple to fix and get in the next build." Guess what? That's not always true. Some things are hard to fix, and sometimes in not easy to identify ways. Code has dependencies, there are integration points, or even that the code is old and the original person who wrote it is no longer here. There have been times that "simple fixes" took a very long time to be looked at, and that's not even the ones that get dropped in priority (another issue). While it is often easy for QA to find fixes it is not as easy for Development to be able to create and check-in a fix. Sometimes we need to understand what is happening with the defects once they are submitted.
So when submitting that next bug that was easy for you to find, remember that it may not be so easy for Developers to fix it.
