April 15th, 2014

Microspeak: bar check

A bar check sounds like the sort of thing you receive at the end of a long evening of drinking, but that’s not what a bar check is. Among the things that happen at ship room meetings is reviewing each bug that has a proposed fix and deciding whether to accept or reject the fix.

Another thing that happens at ship room meetings is the bar check: The person representing the bug describes the issue and what is known about it so far and asks for a preliminary assessment from the ship room as to whether this is the sort of bug they would approve if a fix were available, in other words, whether it meets the bug bar. If the answer is No, then there is no need to go to the effort of developing a fix for it right now, since you know it would get rejected anyway.

Author

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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