The circle of fix
(Lights up. Frantic developers in cubicles, offshore support reps on video calls, and a giant spinning wheel labeled “Circle of Fix” looming over the stage like the Circle of Fifths but built entirely out of Jira tickets. The build has already failed. The orchestra swells.)
Opening chorus, the onshore team
(to the tune of a rising perfect fifth, slightly off-key)
We shipped the code to Bangalore at night, Thought we’d wake up to features shining bright! But every patch they send comes back with flair, A brand-new bug in every layer!
Offshore support choir, sunny and upbeat
Namaste, sir! Your ticket is resolved! We fixed the null by making three evolve! Please to be closing, rate us five out of five, Regression suite? We keep that barely alive!
The circle of fix, full company
(sung in overlapping rounds, like a fugue that never resolves)
It goes C to G to D to A, Then E fixes B which breaks yesterday! Every dominant bug spawns a subdominant twin, We modulate keys but the crashes stay in!
Round and round in the Circle of Fix, Every perfect fifth costs us sixty-six! We outsource the patch, they outsource the blame, And the circle keeps turning, it’s always the same!
Verse, the senior dev, world-weary baritone
I once wrote clean code in the key of C-sharp, Now I’m chasing stack traces through functions that warp. They “refactored” my function to save fourteen lines, Now it sings in twelve tones and summons daemons at runtime.
Verse, the offshore lead, cheerful soprano
We work for one-fifth of your Silicon pay, So you get one-fifth quality, fair trade, I’d say! We fix it in React, then port it to Flask, Then wrap it in COBOL because PM asked!
Bridge, the product manager, spoken over chaotic jazz chords
“Scope is fixed, deadline is fixed, budget is fixed, Everything else is flexible!” (Beat.) “Why is nothing working?!”
Final chorus, everyone, descending into glorious chaos
Circle of Fix, modulating pain! Every tritone resolved births a bug once again! We’ll be here forever in seven-sharp hell, Pushing hotfixes nightly while stakeholders yell!
Round and round in the Circle of Fix, The bugs go marching four by four, hurrah? Hurrah? We modulate up but the quality dips, And the circle keeps spinning… (whisper) …send it to the Philippines.
Blackout on a single unresolved dominant seventh chord. A lone support rep from the dark:
“Have you tried turning it off and on again?”
Why the wheel keeps spinning
It’s funny because it’s true. A lot of small and medium businesses (SMBs) in the Denver metro find themselves humming some version of this song: a feature gets built, it breaks something else, the fix gets handed to whoever is cheapest and available, and three weeks later you’re back where you started with a new bug and a thinner budget.
The wheel isn’t a vendor problem, an offshore problem, or a “bad developers” problem. It’s a process problem, and it gets very expensive very fast. The longer a defect survives before someone catches it, the more it costs to fix. A bug caught while you’re still writing the requirement is a five-minute conversation. The same bug caught in production, after a customer hits it, can cost orders of magnitude more to unwind, a relationship Barry Boehm documented decades ago and the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) put hard numbers behind in its report on the economic impacts of inadequate software testing. Every loop around the Circle of Fix is you paying the late-stage price over and over.
What actually breaks the cycle
You don’t escape the wheel by yelling at the support choir. You escape it by changing three things.
1. Write requirements someone can actually build to
Most “the offshore team broke it” stories are really “nobody wrote down what ‘it’ was.” When the spec is a Slack message and a hope, every developer fills the gaps with a different guess, and the gaps are where bugs live.
What “good enough” looks like for an SMB:
- A one-page description of what the user is trying to do, not how to code it.
- Concrete acceptance criteria: “an invoice over 30 days past due shows in red on the dashboard,” not “improve the dashboard.”
- The edge cases you already know about (what happens with a $0 invoice, a refund, a deleted customer).
You do not need a 40-page specification. You need enough that two different people would build the same thing.
2. Give every piece of work one owner
The song’s funniest line is the truest: “We outsource the patch, they outsource the blame.” When responsibility is shared across an onshore team, an offshore team, and a product manager, it is owned by no one, and the bug just keeps getting passed around the stage.
Pick one person, internal or external, who owns each feature end to end and is accountable for it working in production. Cheaper hands on the keyboard are fine. Diffuse ownership is what kills you.
3. Automate the regression tests
The choir’s confession, “Regression suite? We keep that barely alive,” is the whole problem in one line. Without automated tests, every fix is a coin flip on whether it quietly breaks something that used to work. That’s the literal mechanism of the wheel: E fixes B which breaks yesterday.
A practical starting point:
- Automated tests covering your handful of money paths (checkout, billing, the report leadership reads every Monday).
- A continuous integration check that runs those tests on every change before it merges.
- A short manual checklist for the things that are genuinely hard to automate.
You don’t need 100% coverage on day one. You need a net under the 10 transactions that, if they broke, would cost you customers or a clean month-end close.
How it plays out
For most SMB codebases, stepping off the wheel is a phased effort, not a rewrite:
- Stabilize (1-2 weeks): map the recurring bugs, find the two or three that keep coming back, and write tests that lock them down so they stop returning.
- Add the net (2-4 weeks): stand up continuous integration and automate the money-path tests, so new changes get caught before they ship.
- Tighten the intake (ongoing): adopt the lightweight requirements-and-ownership habit above for every new piece of work.
What your team has to do: name the owner, tell us which transactions actually matter to the business, and resist the urge to skip testing the next time a deadline is “fixed, fixed, and fixed.”
Watch-outs
- Cheapest-bid whiplash. Rotating vendors for each fix guarantees nobody understands the system. Continuity beats hourly rate.
- “We’ll add tests later.” Later never comes, and the wheel keeps spinning. The net pays for itself the first time it catches a regression before a customer does.
- Refactors nobody asked for. Saving fourteen lines is not worth summoning daemons at runtime. Changes should trace back to a requirement and a test.
Next step
If your software life feels like a chord that never resolves, the fix is process, not panic. Our [[Software development]] work helps Denver SMBs put requirements, ownership, and automated testing in place so the wheel finally stops turning.
Tired of singing the same chorus on loop? Let’s help you step off the wheel.