Project BugSpray

The original name of DoneDone was BugSpray. I thought it was a clever name.

Can’t you see the fantastic analogies between a can of bug spray and a bug tracker that helped you kill a slew of bugs? Can’t you envision a marketing plan where we design a parodied version of a bug spray label? Kills bugs 99% of the time! Now with release builds! Long-lasting protection from ticks, mosquitoes, null references, gnats, off-by-one errors, and other pests.

BugSpray. It was brilliant.

Craig liked the name DoneDone more. At the time, it was a take on a phrase that was gaining popularity in the agile movement:

Software developers have a reputation for being somewhat careless when answering the question “are you done with this feature”? In fairness, this is an ambiguous question — it can mean “done programming” and this is generally what a developer will have in mind when answering. However, the meaning of interest is usually “are you done programming, creating test data, actually testing, ensuring it’s deployable, documenting…”.

Proverbially, to get an answer to that, the question to ask is, “I know that you are done, but are you DONE-done?”

And so, DoneDone it was. Although, at first, we weren’t clear on its spelling…

And, sometimes our customers might take some liberties with our name as well…

I sent a support email and DoneDone Support team already responded…the answer was “No”…Well, this is Dumbdumb.

But, that’s OK. Besides, customers call the thing they log in DoneDone a lot of names besides “bug” — issue, ticket, task, request. BugSpray probably would have limited our audience.

In the end, I think DoneDone is the more appropriate name. If the fixer has fixed something and the tester has verified that something, that something is done and done.