So far we've covered several best practices for triaging effectively and efficiently within Bugsnag. But just knowing about these best practices isn't necessarily going to be enough to deliver the best possible software to your users. In order to do that, you're going to need to find a way to incorporate these best practices into your overall engineering process. So let's talk about some ways to accomplish that. This is the third video in a three-part series on how to approach software bug triage. Part 1: Bug Triaging Principles Part 2: Tips for Effective + Efficient Bug Triage Part 3: Developing a Bug Triage Process with Your Team Transcript 00:15 so far we've covered several best 00:17 practices for triaging effectively and 00:19 efficiently within bug snag but just 00:22 knowing about these best practices 00:24 isn't necessarily going to be enough to 00:26 deliver the best possible software 00:29 to your users in order to do that you're 00:32 going to need to find a way to 00:33 incorporate these best practices 00:35 into your overall engineering process so 00:38 let's talk about some ways to accomplish 00:40 that 00:42 it's really important to make sure that 00:44 consistent and accurate bug triage 00:46 is a performance target for your team 00:49 so tech leads engineering managers and 00:52 engineering leaders of all kinds 00:55 this one's for you each of your bug 00:57 snack projects and generally each one of 00:59 your code bases 01:00 should have an owner someone on the team 01:02 who's ultimately accountable 01:04 for the health and stability of that 01:06 given project 01:08 now they're also accountable for making 01:10 sure that their teams are following a 01:12 process 01:13 by which bugs are being regularly 01:14 triaged and also accurately triage right 01:18 there are lots of workflow actions that 01:19 you can take in bug snag 01:21 so it's one thing to hit inbox zero and 01:23 it's 01:24 another degree of engineering excellence 01:27 to be making the right triage and calls 01:30 time and time again so often the person 01:33 tasked with this is going to be someone 01:34 in an engineering leadership role but 01:37 they don't necessarily need to be the 01:38 person 01:39 doing the daily triaging work all the 01:41 time or fixing the bugs themselves 01:43 they're the one who is responsible for 01:46 creating a culture of regular triaging 01:50 and accurate bug remediation within 01:52 their team so again 01:54 make it a performance target make sure 01:55 that you're tracking the decree to which 01:57 bugs are being triaged 01:59 and the degree to which good triaging 02:01 decisions are being made 02:04 when it comes to developing a triaging 02:06 process within your engineering team 02:09 the fundamental question to be asking is 02:12 who 02:12 on the team is responsible for triaging 02:14 bugs today 02:16 now there are all kinds of valid answers 02:18 to this question 02:19 and what those answers look like depends 02:21 a lot on how your team is structured 02:23 how responsibilities are spread 02:25 throughout the team 02:26 and so on but some ideas to get you 02:30 started 02:31 things we've seen work really well is 02:33 coming up with a daily or 02:34 weekly rotation where an engineer on the 02:37 team is responsible 02:39 for handling periodic triage during that 02:41 work day or during that week 02:44 and by doing this it should be clear to 02:46 everybody on the team 02:48 who's responsible for looking at bugs 02:50 today who's responsible for doing 02:51 periodic triage today 02:53 but however you decide to answer this 02:56 question it's just 02:57 really important to check in with your 02:59 team and make sure that you have a good 03:01answer that you all buy into 03:03 that it's clear to everyone who's 03:05 responsible for what 03:06 as it relates to triaging bugs in your 03:09 system 03:11 so once you've thought about your 03:13 triaging rotation 03:15 how you spread the responsibility of 03:16 doing periodic daily bug triage across 03:19 your team 03:20 it's also important to think about how 03:21 you want to handle the situation where 03:24 someone on the team ships a new feature 03:26 and there's a bug that's newly 03:28 introduced in that code that that 03:30 engineer just sent out what if that 03:32 engineer isn't the one who is on 03:34 the triage rotation for the current day 03:36 how do you handle that 03:38 again as with the last point there are 03:40 lots of valid answers to this question 03:42 it really depends on 03:43 how you distribute responsibilities 03:46 throughout your team how you deliver 03:47 software and so on 03:48 but one thing that we do at bug snag and 03:52 we 03:53 have had a lot of success with this is 03:55 to make it the responsibility of the 03:57 engineer who is deploying new code to 04:00 perform any necessary reactive triage 04:03 which means addressing any bugs 04:05 introduced in their new code 04:07 and this tends to make a lot of sense 04:09 because it's usually true that the 04:10 person shipping the new code has 04:12 the most context on what that code is 04:15 trying to do how that code works how 04:16 that code fits into the larger system 04:19 and it doesn't necessarily make sense 04:20 for the person who is broadly 04:22 dealing with reactive triage of bugs 04:24 across the entire system 04:26 to look at that newly introduced bug 04:30 usually what you'll end up having is the 04:32 person who's doing the periodic triage 04:34 they'll be looking at bugs that are 04:36 newly introduced from 04:38 edge cases in legacy code or from things 04:41 that were previously snoozed that have 04:43 re-entered the four review state or 04:45 things that were fixed 04:47 and have happened again in new versions 04:49 of the code 04:51but think about the distinction between 04:54 that set of responsibilities and who 04:56 looks at bugs coming from 04:58 code you've just released again 05:01lots of valid answers to this question05:03but think about it 05:05 what's going to work best for your team 05:09 so before we get into the live q a i 05:11want to address 05:12one question we sometimes hear at this 05:15 point 05:16 and that is yeah this all sounds really 05:18 great this 05:19 daily triaging this getting to inbox 05:22 zero having an inbox that has 05:25 a high signal to noise ratio etc 05:29 allowing us to be efficient with our 05:30 triaging process that all sounds 05:31wonderful 05:32 but we haven't been doing a great job of 05:35 triaging our bugs historically 05:36 and they've started piling up so we've 05:39 got a huge set of errors in our inbox 05:41and it just feels daunting to start 05:43 reviewing them what can we do 05:45 to get things back on track so 05:49 if your team falls into this category if 05:52 this describes you 05:53 first of all i'd say for most teams with 05:56 a little bit 05:57 of focus it's possible to 06:00 plow through that backlog and get down 06:02 to inbox zero 06:04 and get things on track but if that's 06:07 still too much to take on 06:08 we've got a few best practices a few 06:10 tips really 06:12 to help you get your inbox under control 06:13 so you can get back on track 06:15 and start doing the recommended 06:18 daily triage workflow earlier we talked 06:21about the case of 06:22 a monolithic code base and how using a 06:25 shared bookmark 06:26 could give a team a refined view 06:30 down to the set of full review errors 06:32 that applies just to their subset 06:34 or subsection of a monolithic code base 06:37 you can apply this same principle 06:39 if you're trying to get your set of 06:42 four review errors down to a more 06:43 manageable set 06:45 you can essentially create a filter 06:49 that reflects the highest priority or 06:52 the likely 06:53 most impactful bugs in your for review 06:56 set 06:56 and you can start triaging these bugs 06:59 down first 07:00 and then over time you can make your for 07:03 review filter 07:05 more permissive to include a larger and 07:09 larger set of the total for review bugs 07:11and we'll take a look at what this would 07:14 look like inside the dashboard 07:16 okay so here we are looking at the inbox 07:19 for a project that has 31 forward view 07:21errors 07:22 you can see that right here and 07:25 let's say this is a few errors more than 07:28 it feels realistic for us to 07:32 get a handle on in terms of daily 07:33 triaging and we'd like to 07:35 follow this recommendation of starting 07:37 with a scope down 07:39 version of just the most high impact for 07:42review errors 07:44 what we can do is we can start to 07:46 consider 07:47 some filters we can apply to zero in on 07:50 the 07:50 highest impact or highest priority of 07:53 these 31 errors 07:55 so first of all let's go ahead and limit 07:58 this search 07:59 to only those errors affecting the 08:01production stage 08:05 so we'll apply that we say okay we've 08:07 gone down to 29 for review errors once 08:08 we apply that stage filter 08:10 let's continue and scope this down 08:14 instead of considering 08:15 error warning and info level severities 08:18 let's just consider 08:19 error and for the type rather than 08:23 including handled and unhandled errors 08:25 let's only look at 08:27 unhandled errors and as a point of 08:30 review 08:30 unhandled errors are errors that bug 08:32 snack automatically detects 08:34 and reports handled errors are 08:37 errors that you manually notify bug snag 08:40 about 08:41so we'll apply these filters that's 08:44 taken it down to 11 for review errors 08:47 and rather than considering all time 08:50 let's start by just looking at errors 08:52 that have happened in the past 08:54 week so we apply that and now we're down 08:56 to 08:57 10 for review errors hopefully a much 09:00 more manageable number than the previous 09:02 31 09:02 so from here we can start our triaging 09:05 workflow but before we do that 09:07 let's save this search 09:10 so we can bookmark the current search 09:13 and we can call this 09:16 priority for review now the two 09:19 options here set as my default view for 09:21the project 09:23 let's go ahead and click that that means 09:25 anytime you 09:27 go to this project in bug snag these 09:29 filters will be automatically applied 09:32 by default and then let's also click 09:35 share this bookmark with my team 09:37 this means that everyone on your bug 09:39 snack team will also have access to this 09:41filter from their inbox 09:42 and be able to triage down the same 09:46 set of high impact for review bugs 09:50 we can see that our bookmark was saved 09:52 it's highlighted to indicate that we're 09:53 currently searching by this 09:55 this bookmark now anyone on our team can 09:58 click this 09:58 and get to the same filtered view of 10:00 their inbox and from here we can all 10:03 proceed with the triaging workflow we 10:05 already discussed 10:09 okay let's say a few days have gone by 10:11 now the team has been consistently using 10:13 this priority for review bookmark 10:16 to do daily triaging using this 10:19 scope down set of full review errors 10:22 we've been consistently hitting inbox 10:24 zero on a daily basis 10:26 now it's time to expand this saved 10:29 bookmark 10:30 to include a larger set of the 10:33 total for review errors so in order to 10:36 do that 10:37 let's just modify some of these filters 10:39 so let's say 10:40 instead of just considering production 10:42 errors let's include staging errors as 10:43 well 10:45 let's include warning level 10:49 uh severities apply that as well okay 10:51now we're up to seven 10:53 and instead of just considering the past 10:55 seven days of history let's also look at 10:57 any bug that's occurred in the last 30 10:59 days what we can do here is go back to 11:02 this bookmark that we've already created 11:04 and saved with the team 11:05 and say update with current filters 11:09 update shared bookmark this is telling 11:10 us that this is a shared bookmark so 11:13 everyone on the team 11:14 will be able to use this updated version 11:16 of it we'll click 11:17 update so there we go 11:20 now we have a new and improved priority 11:23 for view filter that includes 11:25 a larger set of the total four review 11:27 errors 11:28 and following this process over time we 11:30 can get to a place where 11:32 eventually we don't need this special 11:33 bookmark anymore we can just use 11:36 plain old for review filter that 11:39 includes 11:40 the global set of four review errors for 11:43 this project 11:44 so again creating a custom bookmark 11:48 that zeroes in on the highest impact of 11:50 your four review errors 11:52 is a great way to iteratively work your 11:54 way toward triaging down 11:56 the full set of four review bucks in 11:58 some rare cases 12:00 the suggestions that we've covered so 12:02 far aren't going to go 12:04 far enough and in these cases what you 12:07 can choose to do is to 12:10 mark every error in your inbox as fixed 12:14 now this is a fairly aggressive tactic 12:17 but the effect that this will have 12:19 is that any bug that is continuing to be 12:22 ongoing 12:24 will re-enter the for review state as it 12:27 occurs 12:28 in a future release of your software and 12:32 this should give you enough breathing 12:34 room to 12:35 jump start your daily periodic triage 12:38 process 12:40 rather than trying to start that process 12:42 with 12:43 hundreds or thousands of errors to 12:45 review 12:46 you can temporarily get down to inbox 12:49 zero 12:50 and get on to a triaging workflow 12:54 when the number of errors to review is 12:56 is relatively low 12:59 so again this isn't something to do 13:01frequently 13:02 but it can be very effective in the rare 13:04 cases where it's called 13:06 for so i hope you found these 13:09 recommendations helpful 13:10 and i hope that they've given you some 13:12 things to reflect on as you consider 13:14 your team's approach to 13:16 error triaging and your wider 13:18 engineering process 13:19 our ultimate goal here is to help you 13:21focus on the most impactful work at the 13:23 current moment 13:24 whether that means fixing your most 13:26 critical bug or building your next big 13:32 feature 13:41 you

bugsnag

Target

How to Develop a Bug Triage Process Efficiently

About Author

Comments

TOPICS

THIS ARTICLE WAS FEATURED IN

Related Stories

A Little Dropbox, Bugsnag, and a Lot of Visibility During Error Investigation

How to Achieve Effective and Efficient Bug Triage

What Are the Best Practices for Triaging Software Bugs

Triaging Support Tickets the Smart Way

Identifying and Addressing Key Web3 Vulnerabilities

Streamlining Bug Triage: 10 Must-Have Code Snippets for QA Teams

A Little Dropbox, Bugsnag, and a Lot of Visibility During Error Investigation

How to Achieve Effective and Efficient Bug Triage

What Are the Best Practices for Triaging Software Bugs

Triaging Support Tickets the Smart Way

Identifying and Addressing Key Web3 Vulnerabilities

Streamlining Bug Triage: 10 Must-Have Code Snippets for QA Teams

Light-Mode

Classic

Newspaper

Minty

Dark-Mode

Neon Noir

Minty

HN StartUps