Bug/Defect Triage Meeting in Software Testing: In this softwaretestingo tutorial post, we are going to discuss in detail one of the major concepts of Defect Triage Meeting:
- What should be involved in bug triage (defect triage)
- What is the meeting process like bug triage meeting roles and responsibility
- How can you handle defect triage meetings or the exit criteria of bug triage meetings?
I wish you had a basic idea about testing concepts like a defect, bug, error, defect life cycle, severity, and priority because without knowing about these things, understanding what defect triage is will be very difficult. So, my request to all who do have any idea about those concepts is that they take a look at the following:
- Difference between defect, bug, and error
- Defect life cycle
- Severity and priority
What is Defect?
If an application is not behaving as expected, then that’s called a bug or defect in software testing.
What is the defect triaging meaning?
According to Wikipedia, triage means “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.”
Similarly, software testing introduced the term to prioritise application or project defects. Usually, bug triage is used in a big project because there is a chance of getting many defects on a big project compared to a small project. So, when you get many bugs in a big project, time triage helps you 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 severity of the defects. If any changes are required, they are needed; after doing all this, they finalize the defects and assign them to resources. This is mainly happening in agile project management.
Defect Triage Meeting
Bug triage is conducted to sort out all the open bugs and correct resolution on time. When the testers started testing the application, if they found any defect, they raised the defect in a defect management tool like HP QC / JIRA / Bugzilla. Then, the defect triage meeting happens with the presence of the below people and takes necessary action.
- Project manager
- Test lead
- Test manager
- Tester
- Development lead or developer
- Business analyst
- Environment manager
Presenting people like business analysts, environment managers, and test managers is not compulsory. But when necessary, the test lead and project manager invite those people, and they can give their input about any defects. The entire team is called the Triage Team.
The main objective of conducting triage meetings is to track all the open defects and ensure that the defects get the correct resolution promptly. During the meeting, the triage team will first validate the open defects by questioning
- Is this a valid defect
- Is this defect reproducible?
- Is this defect worth fixing
- When to fix the defect
And also categorize the defects like:
- We are going to fix it now.
- We are going to fix it later.
- We are never going to fix this.
This defect triage also helps in software testing when an organization lacks the resources to test an application. The bug triage meeting mainly happens weekly and monthly, which will differ from project to project.
Defect Triage Process
Defect Triage is a Process that helps to re-balance; for example, take a look when an application has a huge number of bugs and few testers are there to test bug triage helps to prioritize the bugs and try to cover high-priority defects as many as possible.
Most organizations prioritize accessing the defects, but adding severity is also a good practice. The bug triage process can be conducted in 3 phases.
- Defect review
- Defect assessment
- Defect Assignment
The triage team will review the open and rejected defects in the Defect review phase.
Defect assessment: In this phase, each team member presents their perspective on prioritizing the defects based on their content, priority, and severity.
Defect Assignment: The product managers set the priority based on all inputs and assign the defect to release, which means for the current or future release, and assign it to the correct owner of the defect/ team for further action.
In the triage meeting, all defects are discussed as 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
- The test lead starts the meeting with the defect report sent to all participants.
- The discussion starts with the pending action items of the previous bug triage meeting. The update on any defects discussed was given at the last triage meeting.
- Suppose a new defect is reported, then the first review and evaluation of that defect for correct assignment of priority and severity. The first team will verify priority and severity is properly; if not, then that will be corrected in the meeting.
- The developer team also discusses the complexity of fixing the defect and the risk associated with the defects.
- The triage team will conclude 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 related comments are also added to the defect ticket.
- All the essential updates and action items are noted down.
- After the triage meeting, the test lead will send all the discussed details to all the participants.
Bug triage meeting is a good approach to managing the defect in a testing life cycle. The frequency for conducting bug triage should be weekly, monthly, or 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, you can comment on the comment section, and I try to rectify that.
