In Agile software development, the decision to fix bugs or not is decided in one important meeting - bug triage meeting. A bug triage meeting; also called a defect triage meeting is a regular sync where key stakeholders review new software defects assess their severity and business impact, assign ownership and decide whether they must be fixed immediately or deferred.
In the bug triage meeting, key participants must attend, with each role having their responsibilities.
- QA/ Test Lead - Presents a list of open bugs, steps to reproduce and suggested severity.
- Development Lead/ Lead developer - Assesses the technical complexity, root cause and fix effort needed.
- Product owner/ Business Analyst - Their role is to evaluate the bug and identify how it affects user experience and business operations.
- Project Manager/ Scrum Master - Facilitates meetings, track timelines and removes blockers.
Objectives of Bug Triage Meeting
The objectives of a bug triage meeting is to determine what bugs to fix, who will fix and how urgently the bugs need to be fixed. The meeting therefore aims at 4 main outcomes;
- Accept & Assign - One objective of this meeting is to set priority i.e. How urgent is it to fix the bug? and assign this to a developer for fixing. Bug can be fixed either on the current sprint or next sprints depending on the priority set.
- Reject - Not every bug captured by a tester during testing is valid. During a bug triage meeting a bug can be marked as invalid or not a bug due to several reasons including wrong data was used during testing.
- Duplicate - A defect may be logged twice. In this meeting, duplicate bug items should be linked to existing tracked issues.
- Defer/ Won't Fix - Low impact defects can be postponed to a future release or dropped all together.
The bug triage meeting serves as the quality gate within the defect lifecycle, filtering 'New' defects into the 'Open' development queue or routing them to 'Rejected'.
Top comments (0)