Hey Eric,

Cool article and great insights. I’d like to suggest that, as you mentioned earlier in the article, not all bugs are created equal. Thus, I believe proper triage of bugs is absolutely essential. One of the most important parts that needs to come out of triage is a priority of bugs to attack first. This priority calculation should also take a couple of things into consideration. Estimated time to fix, i.e. how much manpower will it cost? Business value, i.e. is it causing customer pain or business pain? It should even include a variable on how the business is doing. Is it already growing well, or is growth faltering? This “growth factor” would put a weight between the customer pain and business pain. The better the growth, the less one needs to concentrate on business pain. Or vice-versa. Depends on the boss’ view of the business.

That may sound confounded for a bug triage, but if the system is built right (and to be honest, I have yet to see one do it all right yet), then agility is built into the “quality fixing” system. If issues are also part of the project planning, aka tasks to get done for new features, then this triage will still work really well.

Oh, and naturally, bugs should be avoided in general. But we know we are all humans and prone to mistakes. So, we still need that super-duper bug triage.