Unraveling the Tangle: Streamlining The Defect Triage Process

Understanding and implementing an effective triage process is imperative to the smooth functioning of DevOps and QA teams. This process ensures software defect assessment, prioritization, and prompt assignment to ensure swift resolution.

However, it’s not as simple as saying, “Let’s improve our defect triage process.” There are a ton of different factors that come into play, each affecting your process in different ways. So let’s dive into specific ways to streamline your team’s workflows.

Define Clear Triage Criteria

Clear triage criteria involve establishing precise guidelines for categorizing and prioritizing defects. These guidelines encompass severity, impact, frequency, and user feedback, ensuring a systematic approach to issue resolution. By aligning these criteria with the organization's objectives, resources focus on addressing impactful problems in line with overarching goals. This approach optimizes decision-making, resource allocation, and user satisfaction.

Establish a Triage Team

Once you have a core idea of how to outline your defects, you’ll want to form your team of people to handle them accordingly. By establishing a team at the heart of your defect triage process, you’ll have people who are always in the know and can handle whatever comes at them. As an example, let’s cover how your internal teams can tackle triage:

• Dev teams are the frontline of your defense. They’re writing the code and unit tests and fundamentally understand your product’s inner workings. They can offer insight into how to resolve defects and ensure adequate testing from the start.

• QA teams will review the code once the devs pass it. They’ll be able to take a fine-toothed comb through it all with extensive test suites and detailed feedback on their issues. These teams will be front-and-center regarding reporting and managing defects and how impactful these issues can be.

• Finally, CI teams like your DevOps squads are the ones who guide the entire operation. They facilitate communication between everyone and help with the final say on whether or not a defect will stop them from a new deployment.

Implement a Triage Workflow

Now that you have the “what” and the “how,” it’s time to figure out the “how.” Creating a blueprint for how your teams should handle these defects is crucial. Ideally, you’ll want to implement a system that helps define a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for how your teams will handle defects from start to finish.

To create a workflow, you’ll need to answer two big questions: How do you collect data on your defects, and how will you resolve them? To answer the first question, you’ll want to narrow down how others can submit defects to your defect triage team, whether through an internal system, something like Jira, or even customer support messages.

For the second question, you’ll want to have a solid outline of how your teams will handle these defects from start to finish, including initial assessment, classification, prioritization, assignment, and resolution tracking.

Automate Triage Data Collection

Once your teams are assembled and they know their plan of attack, you’ll need to lay out how you’ll collect the information for all your defects. You should be using tools that can collect data about the defects in your system, ideally done via automation over manual methods, and collecting data like error logs, screenshots, and actions to replicate the issue.

Ideally, you’ll want an automated tool to take care of this — there’s no secret here; automation just makes everyone’s job easier. Some tools can capture more than just the basics, such as tracking flaky tests and creating individual reports for your triage team. These tools make your team’s job easier and can provide valuable insight into the entire process.

Conduct Regular Triage Meetings

Another vital way to keep ahead of your defect triage process is simply communication. Regular meetings to review and prioritize defects help give your triage team a clear idea of what needs to be done and why. It’s also an excellent opportunity for collaboration across the three different teams and encourages active participation and feedback.

In these meetings, your defect triage team should discuss the severity of defects and prioritize the most impactful ones (based on the criteria you all agreed to). This allows them to have a consistent line of communication and make effective decisions together to solve these issues.

Leverage Collaborative Tools

On top of your scheduled meetings, you’ll want to employ collaboration tools to keep your teams connected the entire time. Including collaborative platforms (beyond your Slack/Teams) or bug-tracking systems can help manage and keep a close eye on your defects. They’ll help you track the bugs and defects you’ve caught and stand as a central hub for your triage info.

These tools can often go more than just collaboration or data collection. Launchable offers deep insights into the performance of your tests with Test Suite Insights, plus rich notifications from our Test Notifications. Other tools can help foster that communication, too, allowing status updates, comments, and custom notifications.

Continuously Improve

Once your defect triage process is in full swing, you’ll want to monitor its progress and improve it when possible closely. Your teams should regularly analyze and evaluate your defect triage process for possible improvements. A sense of continuous improvement can work wonders on an already-existing process, especially as tech continues to evolve.

When looking to improve these processes, you should collect information from a wide net — your customers, testers, stakeholders, and devs can all offer input that might help. Taking a look at your tests can help, too, with tools like Predictive Test Selection helping shorten your feedback loop. You should be looking from a top-down view, too, so you can spot inefficiencies in your process and plan fixes when needed.

Foster Collaboration and Communication

Regular meetings can help keep everyone in the loop, but that effort needs to extend beyond those meetings and into their everyday workflow. Work with your team to instill open communication between team members throughout your defect triage process so they can access the people and resources needed to get their jobs done.

To do so, you’ll want to encourage knowledge-sharing and brainstorming sessions in and out of your meetings. You should also talk to your team members to help break down any barriers in communication that may be stopping them, such as more accessible internal docs. Encouraging a collaborative and communicative environment can dramatically improve how your teams function and work together.

How Launchable optimizes defect triage process

Launchable helps take your defect triage process to maximum efficiency. Backed by a powerful machine learning model (personalized by your org’s git data), we help you tackle defects and give you deep insights into your project’s testing process and health.

Automated Defect Prioritization

By leveraging advanced algorithms and historical data, Launchable intelligently identifies and selects tests that are most likely to fail. This not only streamlines the testing process but also optimizes resource allocation, focusing on high-impact areas. With Launchable, teams can efficiently predict tests most likely to have defects and prioritize them, improving the quality of software releases and reducing time-to-market with a smarter defect process.

Comprehensive Test History

Launchable also collects detailed history of all your tests and their performance, which includes pass rates and failure patterns. When you arm your team with this data, they can make data-driven decisions about defects, which helps ensure your priorities are appropriately aligned and teams stay proactive.