What is defect triage?
Defect triage is how testing teams sort and prioritize bugs. Like a hospital emergency room triaging patients, you evaluate each defect's severity and impact to determine what needs immediate attention and what can wait.
Do you have any examples of defect triage?
Picture your team's morning defect triage meeting. You're reviewing four issues that surfaced overnight:
- Severity 1 (Critical): Payment system is down, preventing all customers from completing purchases
- Severity 2 (High): Search results don't display product prices, forcing users to click into each item
- Severity 3 (Medium): Product images load at low resolution on mobile devices
- Severity 4 (Low): Misaligned copyright text in the footer
The critical payment issue gets immediate attention, the search bug is assigned for the current sprint, the image quality issue is scheduled for the next sprint, and the footer misalignment is logged for future UI cleanup.
Why is defect triage important?
Defect triage prevents your development team from becoming overwhelmed by treating every bug as urgent. By sorting critical issues from minor ones, you ensure serious problems get fixed quickly while managing your team's time and resources effectively. It also helps stakeholders understand why certain fixes take priority over others.
What are the challenges with defect triage?
Everyone brings their own perspective to triage—marketing sees that misaligned button as critical while engineering is more worried about database performance issues. Without clear severity guidelines, these meetings can turn into lengthy debates.
Large products might have hundreds of open defects, making it tough to maintain a clear picture of what matters most.
Large products might have hundreds of open defects, making it tough to maintain a clear picture of what matters most.
