Fellow reader Anita Kalmane asked: “What’s your opinion on having a separate team who is fixing bugs?”

I want to share my response, slightly edited for brevity:

I think it’s a terrible idea, except maybe as a VERY short term measure in an emergency.

The three biggest reasons:

1. It teaches the team producing bugs that “bug fixing is someone else’s problem.”
2. It has the bugfix team working without proper context.
3. Usually companies that do this put the “least skilled” (however they determine that) people on the maintenence/bugfix team. This means the bugfixers never get exposed to the rest of software development (designing systems, etc), so it becomes a sort of a dead-end position.