the.com/software bug triage
deciding which fires are worth putting out before the building actually burns down.
means the process of ranking reported bugs by severity and impact so teams fix what matters before what merely annoys.
from borrowed from medical triage, where doctors sort patients by urgency; software teams adopted the term once bug trackers filled faster than anyone could fix them.
origin fieldmedical triage predates computing by a century.
common scalemost teams use p0 through p4 severity levels.
biggest traploudest reporter often outranks worst bug.
meeting nicknameengineers call it bug bash or triage hell.
for instance
nasa mars rover bugs — engineers triaged software flaws mid-mission across 140 million miles.
y2k bug sweep — companies triaged millions of date bugs before january 1 2000.
jira severity levels — atlassian's default p1 to p5 scale used by thousands of teams.
chromium bug tracker — google triages over 10000 open bugs across chrome releases.