You need to check both that its valid and that its still open. Many times I've seen TODOs with issues in code where the issue was closed. Since nothing gates the Issues being closed, you've now broken CI by closing them.
Say you do get past that hurdle, you've added friction to the process of managing the backlog because the code now needs to be updated when Issues are rejected.
The sad part? With almost 10 years on a 20-30 year old code base with many millions of lines of code that are littered with TODOs, I don't think the presence of a TODO was ever helpful when we decided to actually fix an issue.
> The sad part? With almost 10 years on a 20-30 year old code base with many millions of lines of code that are littered with TODOs, I don't think the presence of a TODO was ever helpful when we decided to actually fix an issue.
Makes perfect sense. TODOs are comment, meaning they're as reliable as comments, meaning they often aren't (and the more time passes and code churns around them the less they are).
Totally agree. I've found that adding a timeline to _remove_ TODOs/DREAMS (whatever the team choice is) from code as a CI check is very applicable -- what you thought might be good at some point in the past may (and likely is) not applicable later down the road!
Clean the code, comment actualities later, etc. -- it helps with knowledge share to find ways to make you attend to cleaning things up.
I've done this too (commenting with the ticket # - well, link to ticket), and it's worked quite well for me/us. It's fairly easy to follow the link & check on it, and it can also serve as a tombstone for why a particular issue isn't being addressed.
Something I've built for myself a couple times is the ability to decorate a test with a ticket number so that the test is expected to pass if an environment variable (usually TICKET) is set to that number, and otherwise is expected to fail.
I also sometimes include a stricter version that includes a test for the current behavior, on the theory that someone changing the current behavior might be in a good position to fix the ticket.
> Something I've built for myself a couple times is the ability to decorate a test with a ticket number so that the test is expected to pass if an environment variable (usually TICKET) is set to that number, and otherwise is expected to fail.
I don't understand that use case.
Do you mean that if you set the envvar, the test now becomes "normal" because the assumption is you're trying to fix the ticket, and thus make the test pass?
I guess that makes sense if your workflow is to "clock in" on tickets, to which you can hook env updates?
- Create ticket in team backlog and add ticket number to TODO comment (and have CI pipeline check that ticket number is valid)