What to Do When Your Developer Says Your Feedback Isn't a Bug

Your developer replies to a comment: “That’s not a bug — it’s working as intended.”

You’re pretty sure it’s a bug. They’re pretty sure it isn’t. Nobody’s lying, and nobody’s stupid — you’re just having two different conversations that sound like one. Resolving it usually takes an email, then a call, then a Slack thread that trails off unresolved because everyone got busy. The comment sits open. The review stalls.

Here’s how to get through that disagreement in one pass instead of three.

What does it mean when a developer says “that’s not a bug”?

It almost always means one of three different things, not one. The phrase “not a bug” is doing the work of “this matches the spec,” “this wasn’t in scope,” or “this is a preference, not a defect” — and each of those needs a completely different response from you.

In software testing, a defect (or bug) is formally defined as a flaw where a system fails to perform its required function — the ISTQB Glossary treats “bug” and “defect” as synonyms, both meaning the built thing doesn’t match what was required of it. That definition matters here because it puts the requirement, not your reaction, at the center of the question. If a developer says “not a bug,” they’re implicitly claiming the requirement was met. Your job isn’t to argue louder — it’s to check whether that claim is true.

The three flavors, spelled out:

• “Working as coded” — the thing does what the code says it should, and the code matches what was asked for. This is a real “not a bug.”
• “Not in scope” — the thing was never part of the request in the first place. Also a real “not a bug,” but a different one — this is a scope conversation, not a defect conversation.
• “That’s a preference” — there’s no spec violation either way; it’s a judgment call being framed as a factual dispute. This is the one worth the most time, because it’s the one where you and the developer are both right and still disagreeing.

Why do founders and developers disagree about what counts as a bug in the first place?

The disagreement exists because most website builds don’t have a written, shared definition of “done” for each piece of work — so “bug” ends up meaning whatever each person privately assumed it meant. Agile teams solve this with a documented “Definition of Done”: a formal, agreed description of the quality bar a piece of work has to clear before it counts as finished. The Scrum Guide frames it as creating “transparency by providing everyone a shared understanding of what work was completed,” specifically so teams don’t relitigate whether something qualifies after the fact. Most founder-developer website reviews skip this entirely — there’s a brief, a few Slack messages, and then a live site, with no agreed checklist of what “matches the brief” actually means.

That gap is exactly where scope disputes live. PMI’s 2018 Pulse of the Profession research found that 52% of projects experienced scope creep, up from 43% five years earlier, and named poorly defined project scope as a primary driver — vague initial parameters make it “much easier for new tasks and features to slip into the project,” according to an analysis of that data. A website review is a smaller, faster version of the same project — and the same rule applies. If nobody agreed in writing on what “done” looks like for a given page, “is this a bug” is a question with no fixed answer, and both sides will find themselves half-right.

How do you figure out whether it’s a bug, a missed requirement, or a preference?

Run three questions before you reply, in this order: was it written down, was it shipped as written, and if it wasn’t written down, does it hurt a real user?

1. Was this specific behavior actually specified anywhere — a brief, a ticket, a pinned comment from an earlier round? If yes, move to question two. If no, it’s a scope or preference conversation, not a bug conversation, and arguing about “bug” is the wrong fight.
2. Does what shipped match what was specified? If it does, your developer is right — it’s not a bug, and the real conversation is whether the spec itself needs to change, which is a scope decision, not a defect report.
3. If nothing was specified, does a reasonable visitor encounter a real problem — something broken, confusing, or blocking a task — or does it just look different from what you pictured? The first is worth raising as a genuine issue even without a written spec behind it. The second is a preference, and it’s fine to say so out loud rather than dress it up as a defect.

Mature engineering teams formalize exactly this distinction instead of debating it fresh every time. Jira’s default resolution categories for a reported issue include “Done,” “Won’t do,” “Duplicate,” and “Cannot reproduce” — Atlassian’s own documentation defines “Won’t do” as “this work item won’t be actioned,” a distinct, named outcome from “fixed.” The lesson for a founder-developer review isn’t to adopt Jira — it’s to borrow the habit: a “not a bug” isn’t a rejection, it’s one of several legitimate resolutions, and naming which one it is ends the argument faster than repeating the original complaint.

What should you do when it’s a genuine judgment call and nobody’s wrong?

Decide by what a real visitor experiences, not by who raised the comment or who wrote the code. Some disagreements survive all three triage questions — the spec was silent, nothing’s technically broken, and reasonable people could land on either side. That’s not a bug dispute anymore; it’s a design decision that got mislabeled as one because “bug” is the only vocabulary most reviews have for “something’s wrong here.”

When you’re at that point, the fastest resolution isn’t more back-and-forth about who’s right — it’s picking a criterion and using it. “Does this cause a real visitor to miss information, get stuck, or misunderstand what to do next?” is a better tiebreaker than seniority, tone, or who’s more stubborn, because it’s checkable by both people looking at the same page. If the honest answer is “no, it just looks different than I expected,” that’s useful information — it tells you this is a preference, and preferences are worth stating plainly (“I’d prefer X”) rather than escalating as a defect.

How do you keep the disagreement from disappearing into a DM or a stalled thread?

Keep the entire disagreement — the original comment, the developer’s pushback, and the resolution — in the same place it started, not scattered across a private message and a follow-up call. This matters because conversations that move off the original thread are conversations that functionally disappear. A “Slack hole” is what happens when “a great idea is lost amidst a sea of other messages and notifications without any follow through,” according to The Predictive Index — and a bug dispute resolved in a DM is exactly that: a decision with no record, waiting to be re-argued the next time someone opens that page and notices the same thing.

There’s a second cost to letting the conversation jump channels: every time it moves — comment to Slack, Slack to a call, call to a follow-up email — someone has to reload the context from scratch. Gloria Mark’s UC Irvine research on workplace interruptions found it takes roughly 23 minutes to fully resume a task after a single interruption, and people typically complete two unrelated tasks in between before returning to it, as Gallup reports. A disagreement that bounces across four channels before resolving isn’t costing you one delay — it’s costing every context switch in between, for both people.

How does Simpl_Markup keep a bug disagreement visible instead of buried in a thread?

Simpl_Markup keeps the original comment, the pin location, and every reply in one threaded record attached to the exact element the disagreement is about — not a side DM that nobody can find in three weeks. Replies go two levels deep directly under the pin, and resolving the parent comment resolves the thread with it, so the outcome and the reasoning behind it stay attached to the spot on the page where the question came up. Every comment also carries a visible status — open, fixed, approved — so “we decided this was working as designed” is a state the whole team can see at a glance, not a fact buried in someone’s memory of a call three days ago.

That’s a meaningfully different shape than a dedicated bug tracker bolted onto a review process — see how Simpl_Markup’s approach compares to BugHerd if you’re currently choosing between the two. It’s also a different shape than resolving disputes purely inside Slack: Simpl_Markup syncs comment status bidirectionally with Slack, so a developer can reply and resolve from the thread they’re already in, but the canonical record — the pin, the async feedback, the resolution — lives on the page itself, not in a channel that scrolls past it within a day.

None of this eliminates genuine disagreement — some “not a bug” calls really are judgment calls, and no tool decides those for you. What it removes is the second cost: the disagreement disappearing before either side has actually resolved it, only to resurface, unresolved, in the next review round.