Something to discuss with your team:
You’re working on a ticket, deep in your own task. Then you notice something odd: in a completely unrelated part of the codebase, the comments don’t match what the code actually does.
Strange.
Maybe someone changed the logic earlier but forgot to update the comments.
Now imagine this was your solo project. You’d probably just fix the comment right away. Write a quick update, commit it, done. How long would that take? A couple of minutes, maybe?
But in a team setting, things often look different.
How does your team handle situations like this? If you spot a comment that needs updating in code you’re not directly working on, what happens next?
- Do you need to create a new ticket, even if it’s just a sentence or two?
- Do you have to track down which ticket introduced that code and who worked on it, just to check with them?
- Or do you hesitate, thinking: “Everyone’s busy. I don’t want to bug someone about something this small.”
- Maybe the process says every change has to be estimated, prioritized, and added to the backlog first. For a tiny comment update, that feels like overkill.
- Maybe every change has to go through review and QA, which makes you worry the team will be annoyed you slowed things down with something so minor.
So instead, you let it go. It’s not part of your current set of tickets in this sprint anyway. Maybe someone else will fix it later… maybe.