What Is Bug Triage And What Advantages Does It Have?

There are many ways in which we find bugs during our testing process. Bugs found during functional testing the newly implemented features in each sprint, bugs found during regression testing, many of them come after exploratory testing sessions and some are found by an automation framework that runs a regression suite each day.

After all these, we end up with a significant number of bugs which lay in the backlog, as only a number of them are critical enough (by critical I mean also from Product management perspective) to be prioritised to be fixed in the current sprint.

Bug triage is an activity of evaluating the bugs to determine their course of action. In our case, the Product Owner is the person who takes the responsibility of selecting from the backlog the bugs that have a bigger impact and higher priority from Product perspective and which needs to be addressed and fixed in the upcoming sprint.

Bug Triaging involves:

• Making sure the bug is still reproducible using the steps provided in the description. If it cannot be reproduced, the tester who checks the bug will close it with the appropriate status.
• Making sure the bug has enough information for the developers to be able to reproduce it. Otherwise, additional information is requested from the reporter and the bug is put on hold for fixing until it gets all the data that is needed.
• Making sure that has the Severity and Priority fields properly set.

We observed several advantages of using the bug triage activity before starting a sprint. Doing the bug triage constantly, the backlog got cleaned and we could get rid of old and untouched bugs. Having a clean backlog, offered us a better visibility. In Agile development process, before starting a new sprint, we set some expectations in amount of user stories to be delivered and bugs to be fixed. Using the bug triage, we became more realistic in setting the amount of work for the upcoming sprint, avoid investing development time in investigating unreproducible or incomplete bugs.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.