The importance of bug triage

No matter if you work with agile or not, on some projects or all of them you may or may not heard the term bug triage, this is a great meeting which in my experience involves three or four people: tech lead, product owner, project manager and QA lead.

This meeting takes place at the end of the day or starting the day, the idea for this meeting is to review all the bugs logged during the day or the day before and check if the bugs was logged correctly checking all the important fields like, clear summary, correct steps and results, severity, priority and the bug itself to make sure all bugs are understood, it also has the goal to identify duplicated bugs . The idea here is that there may be some bugs that can be tackled later and the bugs related to functional areas that may be delivered soon, in that case there may be minor bugs that may have a higher priority and major or critical bugs may have less priority as well.

The other purpose of this meeting is also to check in some way some progress on QA during the day and during testing of the functional areas that were delivered to QA, the less bugs on a story or functional area, the better, and perhaps the reporter had some misspelling, grammar issues, incorrect priority and severity or the bug was not understood by the people in the meeting, in that case, the bug is reviewed and updated and some times the QA is asked about updating the bug and adding a screenshot or video (please always attach evidence to all bugs).

Please take into account this meeting should not take more than half hour for small projects, even an hour may work for large projects, the idea is to pass through all bugs and not just stay a lot of time in one of them, I have seen in the past how this bug triage meeting takes more than an hour, and it's not doing some progress, it's because a bug required more than 15 minutes on discussion. It's also important not to have so many people in this meeting, it'll turn into a long meeting, only leads of each discipline should be in this meeting and if needed, ask other people about bugs and status, but remember not to invite them in this meeting. 

Please note that this is not a required meeting within projects, this is an optional meeting that gives great visibility and status on where you are at and what needs to be tackled or not and rises priorities and severity. If you are feeling kind of lost, or you have a lot to do in the project or you don't have a clear goal or sight on what's going on and what's happening, I encourage you to do this meetings often, depending on the project it may be every two days, every week or every day, that is up to you.

@LuchoAgileQA