Not long ago, we were called in by a company frustrated with their development process. The team could get bugs fixed, but every fix felt like a black box. A ticket would disappear for days or weeks, and then poof it was marked “resolved.” No explanation. No context. Just a note in Jira and a request to verify.
At first, they didn’t think much of it. After all, the bugs were getting fixed. But over time, the lack of transparency eroded trust. They started asking: What’s really going on under the hood? Are we solving problems or just patching over them?
That’s where the real issue came into focus. Fixing bugs without visibility creates fragility. Teams can’t learn from past issues, patterns get missed, and knowledge stays siloed in the heads of a few individuals.
Investing in transparency produces organizational intelligence and reduces dependencies on individuals or wizards. When fixes are explained, documented, and shared, the whole company gets smarter, not just the developer who happened to work on the bug.
Over time, that shift compounds. Instead of firefighting the same issues over and over, the team starts to anticipate and prevent them. Transparency doesn’t just build trust, it builds resilience.
The Cost of “Just Fixed It”
On the surface, a fix without context seems fine. The problem is gone, so the system works again. But in reality, this habit creates long-term costs:
- No institutional learning. If nobody knows what caused the issue, there’s no opportunity to prevent it from happening again.
- Fragile systems. The same root problem might lurk in other parts of the codebase, waiting to break.
- Bottlenecked knowledge. Only the person who fixed it understands what changed, making the team dependent on them.
Without a feedback loop, bugs turn into recurring nightmares. You’re constantly reacting instead of building.
Why Developers Skip the Explanation
Most of the time, it’s not malice. Developers are under pressure to deliver quickly. Explaining the fix feels like “extra” work, especially if they assume no one outside engineering will understand the details.
The problem is, skipping the explanation makes the work invisible. And invisible work is often undervalued, or worse, misunderstood.
What “Explaining the Fix” Looks Like
Explaining a fix doesn’t mean dumping a wall of technical jargon into a Slack thread. It means translating the cause, the impact, and the resolution in a way that’s useful to others.
A good bug fix explanation covers:
- The trigger: What caused the issue?
- The impact: What systems or users were affected?
- The resolution: What was changed, and why will it work?
- The prevention plan: How to avoid similar issues in the future.
This is about building a culture of shared understanding. The point isn’t to turn everyone into a developer, it’s to connect the dots between problems, solutions, and business outcomes.
The Payoff of Transparency
When developers take the time to explain their work, three things happen:
- Trust grows. Stakeholders see progress in context, not just in ticket counts.
- Patterns emerge. Teams can spot systemic issues instead of treating each bug as an isolated event.
- Speed improves. Fewer surprises and repeat issues mean more time for proactive work.
Transparency transforms fixes from invisible firefighting into tangible progress.
Our Take
At Telos, we believe every fix is an opportunity to strengthen the product and the team’s collective knowledge. That’s why we bake explanations into our workflow. If we fix a bug, you’ll know what happened, how it was fixed, and how to prevent it from recurring.
Because software development isn’t just about making things work again, it’s about making them better, one fix at a time.
