[majormajor]

I somewhat feel the opposite about context - I'm not sure there's a better way to get context rapidly than to try to fix bugs. It's a targeted investigation into existing functionality, which helps a lot compared to many other sorts of tasks.

So if you have a module with a bunch of bugs, I could see throwing a contractor at them - after the first couple they'll probably move pretty quickly.

On the other hand, if your bugs are scattered completely separately, then sure, that's gonna be a bad time.

[Ma8ee]

In my experience most tricky bugs aren't isolated, but caused by module A assuming something about module B that isn't true, which makes module C behave strangely.