How to Prioritize Bugs 🐛
A few strategies to move fast, reduce conflicts and keep your backlog small.
Bug fixing is not exactly everyone's favourite engineering activity.
It's a tricky process that requires coordination between several stakeholders, and it's not easy to get it right.
Think about it for a moment. Bugs might be reported by Users to Customer Support, reproduced by QAs / Testers, looked into by PMs and eventually addressed by Engineers.
It's a lot of people involved.
Now, every team has a slightly different process for this, but it always involves some version of these steps:
✍️ Report — bugs are entered in some kind of backlog (...or notified to devs on Slack 🥲)
🚥 Prioritize — bugs are triaged and a priority is assigned. This might be done by QA, PM or Engineers themselves.
🔨 Fix — bugs are addressed and fixed by Engineers.
Out of these three, I have seen the most problems happen in the prioritization stage. Who takes such decisions? How do we avoid conflicts? How much time should we spend on it?
Let's figure this out 👇
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