Why Bug | Defect Triage Meeting is Important in Software Testing?

Bug/Defect Triage Meeting in Software Testing: In this softwaretestingo tutorial post, we are going to discuss in details about one of the major concepts of Defect Triage Meeting like:

• What should be involved in bug triage (defect triage)
• What is the meeting process like bug triage meeting roles and responsibility
• How you can handle defect triage meeting or the exit criteria of bug triage meeting.

I wish you have the basic idea about those testing concepts like defect, bug, error, defect life cycle, severity, and priority; because without knowing about this things it will very difficult to understand what is defect triage? So, my request to all who do have any idea about those concepts then they can take a look on below posts:

• Difference between defect, bug, and error
• Defect life cycle
• Severity and priority

What is Defect?

If an application is not behaving as expected result then that’s called a bug or defect in software testing.

What is the defect triaging meaning?

According to the definition of Wikipedia triage means “Triage is the process of determining the priority of patients’ treatments based on the severity of their condition. This rations patient treatment efficiently when resources are insufficient for all to be treated immediately. The term comes from the French verb trier, meaning to separate, sift or select.”

In a similar way, the term introduced in software testing for the priority of defect in an application or in a project. Usually, bug triage is used in a big project because there is a chance of getting a huge number of defects on a big project as compared to a small project.  So in a big project when you are getting the very large number of bugs that time triage helps you to prioritize those defects in an order.

Need for defect triage?

The main goal of defect triage is to evaluate all the open bugs. Then the team validates the bugs according to the severities of defects if any changes required then changes as per the needed and after doing all this they finalize the defects and assign those defects to resources. This is mainly happening in agile project management.

Defect Triage Meeting

Bug triage is conducting to sort out all the open bugs and correct resolution in a timely manner. When the testers started testing the application if they found any defect then testers raised the defect in a defect management tool like HP QC / JIRA / Bugzilla. Then the defect triage meeting happens with the presence of below peoples and takes necessary action.

• Project manager
• Test lead
• Test manager
• Tester
• Development lead or developer
• Business analyst
• Environment manager

It is not compulsory to present peoples like a business analyst, environment manager, and test manager. But when necessary test lead and project manager invites those peoples and they can give their inputs about any defects. And the entire team is called Triage Team.

The main objective of conducting triage meeting is to track all the open defects and make sure that the defects got the correct resolution in a timely manner. During the meeting, the triage team will first validate the open defects by questioning

• Is this a valid defect
• Is this defect is reproducible
• Is this defect worth to fix
• When to fix the defect

And also categorize the defect like:

• We are going to fix now
• We are going to fix later
• We are never going to fix this

This defect triage also helps in software testing when an organization doesn’t have enough resources to test an application. Mainly the bug triage meeting is happening in a weekly, monthly basis and it will differ from project to project.

Defect Triage Process

Defect Triage is a Process where it helps to re-balance for an example take a look when an application has a huge number of bugs and few numbers of testers are there to test then bug triage helps to prioritize the bugs and try to cover high priority defects as much as possible.

Most of the organizations are takes priority to access the defects but it’s a good practice to add severity as well. Bug triage process can conduct in 3 phase

• Defect review
• Defect assessment
• Defect Assignment

In Defect review phase the triage team will sit together and review the entire open defect including the reject defects also.

Defect assessment: in this phase, each person of the team presents the perspective on how to prioritize the defects based on its content, priority, and severity.

Defect Assignment: The product managers set the priority based on all inputs and assign the defect to release that means for the current release or future release and also assign to the correct owner of the defect/ team for further action.

In the triage meeting, all types of defects are discussed like a high and low priority. If a defect has less information about any defect the developer assigns the defect to the respective testers for more information about the defect.

Defect Triage Meeting Step by Step Process

• Test lead starts the meeting with the defect report which was sent to all participants.
• The discussion starts with the pending action items of the previous bug triage meeting. And the update that was taken on any defects which discussed is last triage meeting.
• If a new defect is reported then the first review and evaluated that defect for correct assignment of priority and severity. The first team will verify priority and severity are properly, if not then that will correct in the meeting.
• The developer team also discusses the complexity of fixing the defect and also the risk associated with the defects.
• The triage team will come to the conclusion that which defect should need an immediate fix and which can be fixed later or can we fix the defect in a future release.
• The defects are assigned to the respective team in the defect management tool and also related comments also added in the defect ticket.
• All the essential updates and action items are noted down.
• After the triage meeting, test lead will send all the discussed details to all the participants.

Bug triage meeting is a good approach to manage the defect in a testing life cycle. The frequency for conducting bug triage should be weekly, monthly or in every sprint (Agile).

I have tried to cover all possible things of a bug triage report, process and meeting. But still if you have any doubts or confusion then you can comment on the comment section and I try to rectify that.