Tracking your insanity

NeighborhoodButcher

A certain Korean corporation is known to some for its abhorrent approach to project management. One of the examples has already been introduced in https://what.thedailywtf.com/t/code-review-malediction/48090 - a bug tracking system, which can be summarized as one big bug itself. To recap - the corporation chose to ignore all the free and proprietary project management solutions, and decided to make an abomination of its own. The result is something that redefines "uselessness". Let me list some of the features:

There is no search feature besides search by id. If you know the exact bug number, you can open it. If you don't - you'll never find it. Want to see all the open bugs your project has? Nope. Want to see what somebody is doing? Nope.
The "no search" approach is taken really seriously. The bugs assigned to you (with one of two specific states - open and assigned) are listed on the front page. Nothing you did in the past is shown anywhere. You'll never come back to what you did unless you remember all the numerical ids. When you submit a changeset that fixes a bug, you have to change the state to "ReviewRequested". That also makes it disappear and you'll never find the bug again, which is real fun if the review gets rejected for any reason.
Speaking of states - there's an enormous graph made in Excel that specifies all the states and transitions a bug can have. It requires 4 FullHD screens to be shown in full. It resembles a game where you have to find a way out of a maze, except when you dive into it, you'll eventually kill yourself.
There are some per-project statistics present on the front page. The system is so finely crafted that you can often see negative total bug counts. Seeing -13.000 open bugs makes everyone really cheerful. Or 100 bugs open of 0 total.
The bug itself is made of a number of tabs which take the whole screen width, each having about two screen heights of form inputs. All with information so useless, nobody even dares to look at most of it.
The bug title, by design, cannot have any meaningful summary of the bug. It is used as a placeholder for some cryptic tags, which are parsed by some scripts. Reading it is like trying to decipher a tag cloud from some random blog.
Bug description also doesn't have any meaningful information in it. There is usually something in the lines of "application X crashes on Y" written in Korean because fuck you all non-Koreans. So, how do I know what the description says? Google Translate of course.
Somebody found out that such descriptions are not enough so they implemented a "notes" feature. This is nothing more than a comment system for a bug, where people can actually ask WTF the bug is about and get some real response. But, in a typical Korean fashion, there are no notifications of new notes, so you have to constantly refresh all your bug pages.
Code review is based on Word documents. Nuff' said.
Each bug must have a category specified for code review to proceed. These categories range from obvious ("memory corruption") to pretty cryptic ("specification misunderstanding"). The system is designed in a way which makes certain fields on certain tabs mandatory depending on chosen category. Since most of the fields are so strange, nobody knows what to put inside, most (all?) of the bugs are given the category which requires the least fields to be specified.
There is a section for some Indian bug tracker. Apparently they have their own parallel one for whatever reason.
The entire workflow of fixing a bug is so convoluted, it takes absurd amounts of time to complete. Real world example - I made a change consisting of literally two words and a semicolon. It took me few seconds to write and about 15 minutes to submit the bug for review. Since we have a separate branch for each physical product, the change needed to be propagated to other branches. That made the original bug replicate itself for each branch making me click through each of the new bugs for about half a day. All this for few seconds of programming.
The bug tracker is ironically named "Agile Software Development".

Tracking your insanity

Using discourse as a community ticket system