Originally written in French. Translated by AI — the meaning has been preserved, not the prose.
Angle
A bug backlog does not track defects: it houses them, and its real function is to make inaction respectable. Every priority set, every committee, every requalification produces the trace of work without producing the one thing that would get the defect out — a fix or a refusal, signed by somebody. A zero bug policy is therefore not worth what it promises in quality, but what it forbids as an outcome; and it immediately runs up against ticket typologies, the separation between bug cards and feature cards, and velocity, which all fill the same housing function under more presentable names.
Synthesis
The mechanism is a chain, and each link looks reasonable taken alone.
Defects first drop out of the plan: the roadmap carries the features, the defects wait "until we have time". Outside the plan, nothing orders them any more — visibility decides, so the complaint of an important customer or the executive who happens on it. The queue meant to make up for that disorder does not correct it: it produces its own work — rereading, requalifying, replanning, holding the committee — and that work looks exactly like steering.
There remains the question of why nobody empties that queue, when everyone knows that a large part of it will never be fixed. The answer is not an informational one. Closing a ticket amounts to writing "we won't do this" and carrying it to the customer, to support and to management. Leaving it open costs nobody in particular. The status quo is stable because it has no author — and "to be prioritized later" is the name given to a refusal nobody has signed.
Once that mainspring is identified, the other devices read as variants. A rich typology offers an honourable exit from any discussion: you file instead of settling. Separating the queues makes the absence of a common arbitration invisible, since nobody ever decided not to compare. Velocity supplies a numbered reason to set defects aside, protecting the metric against the product it is supposed to describe. Three forms, one function.
That is what gives the rule its exact point of application. It does not make the software better; it removes the third outcome, and everything that rested on it becomes visible at once — including the slowdown, which is not produced by the rule but revealed by it: the queue was absorbing a defect rate nobody had to look at.
Hence two consequences the device was also masking. The way out does not run through a review of the stock — it runs through an external flow, support's weekly top three, which selects without paying for the queue's upkeep. And dismantling is not enough: the manufacture of defects has not moved. A dismantled housing device re-forms elsewhere — as a backlog of categories if measuring becomes the work, as a permanent "reduction phase" if the transition has no end.
The same housing function is found outside the perimeter of defects: piling subjects into a general queue so as not to refuse them likewise preserves an unmade decision under the appearance of preserved information. What distinguishes a useful trace from a shelter is then the content of what you write — a reason for refusal, never a waiting status.
Layer contributed by "The Backlog Is Not a Dumping Ground: It's a Tool for Action" (2026-06-03).
Tensions / contradictions
Two notes do not pull in the same direction on visibility. One makes it the system's central flaw — priority follows social exposure rather than cost. The other makes it the way out: support's weekly top three is a ranking by visibility, owned as such. The border lies in the channel and the regularity, not in the criterion itself, and it is not drawn.
Also unresolved: the tension between forbidding the third state and reassessing on signal. A door marked "reopened if the signal returns" is useful, and it has the exact shape of what the rule excludes.
Questions
- In an organization where refusing has a price, who can sign a refusal without escalating it to an arbiter?
- How do you spot a new housing device — a tag, a status, a transition phase — before it settles in?