Software development is as much about making decisions as it is about writing code. While bugs in software are straightforward to document and fix, “bugs” in decision making can be a bigger challenge. By capturing everything in an issue tracker, you can help avoid the second-guessing and flip-flopping that sometimes happen months after making decision.
Every day, we all make countless decisions, and many of those involve other people and a conversation to arrive at a resolution. Instead of just having those conversations offline or in an email thread that will be lost as soon as it’s complete, you can log an issue.
“What payment processor should we choose?” Don’t have a meeting or start an email thread. Log an issue and start the conversation somewhere that will provide you a permanent record of the process. Attach the spreadsheet that you’re using for the evalution. If you need to re-evalute six months down the road, you won’t have to start from scratch.
“We’re limited with our current provider. We’re going to need to rebuild X or switch over to Y.” Just because it’s not a bug in the code doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to be captured, discussed, resolved, and reviewed the same way. By treating it like a bug, creating a resolution, and getting approval to officially consider the issue closed, you’re enabling a simple but powerful workflow for not only making the decision but creating a record for future reference.
If it needs a resolution, it needs to be tracked. By maintaining the history of decisions, discussions, and resolutions, you’ll save yourself pain down the road. You’ll be able to turn to a central place to manage all of your project’s issues. And you’ll never hear, “What did we decide?” or “Why did we decided that?” again.