Microspeak: Closing out, duping out

Windows has gone through many defect tracking systems. The details may change, but the overall shape remains the same. I will defer details to this summary in the Azure DevOps documentation.

One possible Reason for resolution is Duplicate, which means that the issue is already covered by another work item. The act of marking a work item as Duplicate is informally known as duping out. So you can say, “There are three new bugs today, but they are all the same issue as bug 31415, so I’ve duped them out.”

Similarly, the act of marking a resolved work item as Closed is informally known as closing out. “Please look at your resolved bugs and close out the ones that no longer repro.”

(Repro is a common abbreviation for reproduce.)

In both cases, the out is optional. You can say that you have duped a work item (to another work item), and you can say that you have closed a work item.

I find it interesting that the preferred adverbial preposition for “changing the status of a work item to move it further down the lifecycle” is “out”. I suspect that is used because the change in state causes the work item to disappear from a query, so it’s “out of the way”.

Also interesting is that you can’t “resolve out” a bug, even though that follows the same pattern of moving a work item further down the lifecycle.