On the surface a perfectly reasonable question.

Perhaps a step back.

Fixing bugs has costs:

  1. Time ( that time could have been spent adding features)
  2. Money (those features that you are not adding are costing you money)
  3. People (you have to assign developers, and QA)
  4. Bother (it can be a physiological or organizational bother to fix that bug)

The benefits of fixing the bug are pretty straightforward.

  1. The bug is fixed and customers are happy.

So should bugs always be fixed?

It depends if the cost is worth the benefit.

The benefit is usually easy to tell – a bug like inability to login that keeps customers from working must be fixed.

But a bug where the font sizes of a label in a particular screen double in size; that manifests only in Windows 7 32 bit Javanese edition that is used by a single customer? Maybe not.

This is why in bug trackers there are the known statuses

  • Open
  • In Progress
  • Fixed
  • Incomplete

There is also an additional status - Won’t Fix

In other words : only fix bugs where the benefit is greater than the cost.