Imagine that you have a recurring problem in your production environment, one that occurs around once a week. The problem is fairly minor and affects only one user at a time. You can fix the underlying data issue pretty quickly with some custom scripts you wrote. What’s your threshold for fixing the problem permanently, instead of manually fixing it each time it happens?
Let’s say that a full fix for this problem isn’t a trivial matter that can be handled in just a few minutes. Based on your experience, working on these kinds of problems in the past, you think it would take you two or three days to fix. To be safe, you told your boss it would take you a week, not allowing for any unknown factors.
Surely, when balancing a very quick fix versus an entire week (possibly more), not doing something more important seems like a no-brainer.
You chat with your boss and you both agree that it’s better for you to focus your efforts elsewhere. You leave the bug lurking in the system. Once a week or thereabouts, the problem occurs. You run your scripts, verify the cause and patch the issue.
The user is unblocked, you return to what you were doing, and all is good with the world.
Or, is it?
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