The sad graph of software death
The core problem is that &quot;number of issues&quot; is not a meaningful metric, &quot;rate at which business value created&quot; is.<p>At it&#x27;s core, I believe an issue tracker is fundamentally the wrong pattern for developing software and the same pathologies crop up over and over again.<p>Issue trackers seek to accomplish multiple goals: They are communication mechanism between departments, they&#x27;re a way of tracking the state of progress, they&#x27;re a means of prioritization and they&#x27;re a way of evaluating progress. Because these goals lie fundamentally in tension with each other, the same problems predictably occur with long time use of an issue tracker.<p>Issue trackers are like shopping lists without price tags. if you imagine an Amazon Wishlist with all the things you want to buy in life, it&#x27;s not hard to imagine the same graph appearing. Somewhere mixed into all those items is a ferrari and also the washer you need to stop your tap from leaking. And, of course, the list is going to get exponentially longer as time goes on, even as you check items off. But the reason we don&#x27;t get stressed about our ever expanding wants list is because price serves as an intuitive gut check over priority and, as long as we see our personal living standards improve, we don&#x27;t care that we can never fulfil all our wants and we don&#x27;t bother applying &quot;won&#x27;t buy&quot; or &quot;item does not exist in real life&quot; tags on our list. (this is an analogy, ok. Please don&#x27;t try and fight the hypothetical on this, I&#x27;m aware our economic wants are significantly more complicated than that).<p>One of the ideas I&#x27;ve been tinkering with is to treat issue tracking less like a todo list and more like a storefront. A todo list with ever increasing entries is stressful experience, a storefront with expanding inventory is not. Items would have a base cost associated with it and a &quot;shipping cost&quot; so that 2 day shipping costs more than USPS ground (aka: Whenever we can get to it). External clients get to create items on the storefront, set the price and the shipping costs using some kind of artificial currency and engineering gets to figure out which orders to fulfil and in what order to maximize revenue.<p>Of course, to paraphrase jwz, &quot;You have a problem and you think &quot;Oh, I know, I&#x27;ll solve it with an artificial currency&quot;. Now you have two problems&quot;.<p>Still, I think it&#x27;s worthwhile getting back to the foundations and think of what an issue tracker does in the context of software development and whether there&#x27;s a better thing that could serve the same purpose.