The Gift of Time 

When working on a project as a contractor, you often times find yourself getting stuck with the bugs that nobody else wants to fix. It's not because they are terribly hard, but because they are annoying, or vague, or otherwise undesirable. The trick is to save them all for Friday, and here is why.

What you find is that the person originally assinged the bug found it so annoying, or vague, or maybe even difficult, that they assigned it some grossly out of the ballpark time estimate in the defect tracking program. The fun comes when you get the bug, and you have that many hours to fix it. Of course I could go in and adjust that amount of time, but the problem is that I don't know how long it will actually take. This project I'm working on right now is huge, and I'm being given bugs from every corner of the code. Most of the code I've never even looked at before. So I really have no clue how long it will take to fix. What I have found out in the last two days, however, is that every bug I've gotten so far is assigned as a four hour task. And so far they've all taken from 15 minutes to 1 hour to fix.

It's like being given the gift of time. So pick the low hanging fruit on Friday and let the juices run down your chin.