Your product’s version control system can provide a wealth of information about the state of your product. I recommend that you nag your admin to add RSS notification for changes so they just stream out the firehose at you. In checking out a ‘fix’ just now, I discovered a new heuristic to apply to the information that comes out.

+2, 0

For those unfamiliar with CVS, this is how it reports that 2 lines were added, and none were removed. This is important information because that is how many lines it takes to add /* and */ around a block of code.

If a block of code is causing problems, there are two ways to fix it. Either fix it, or comment it out and hope it goes away. Now, you could say that there is a 3rd possability, which is to delete it, but that at least implies a fix. Someone has to conciously look at the code and determine that it is not worth the hassle to debug and nukes it. But a comment implies that they think it is valuable, but they do not know how to solve the problem (right now).

Of course, in a crisis situation it might make sense to comment out the troublesome part and come back to it later, but if that was to happen I would expect there to be a bug logged and the bug number placed in the comment.