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Bug Filing & Triage

Six dimensions. Daily for the first week post-release; twice-weekly after. Triage routes, it does not solve. Fifteen minutes, three outputs: severity, chain level, owner.

Owners: QA, PO, Tech Lead Phase it lives in: After We Build (Volume V) The corpus principle this enacts: A bug is a witnessed gap between what the chain said would happen and what is happening.

Where it lives in the chain

How to do this

Every bug filed has six dimensions:

  1. Severity — how bad is it? (Critical / High / Medium / Low)
  2. Surface — where does the person encounter it? (Page / flow / API / job)
  3. Class — what kind of break is it? (Functional / performance / data / security / copy / accessibility)
  4. Chain level — which level of the chain produced it? (Strategy / Discovery / Scope / Execution / Operation)
  5. Reach — how many people meet it? (One / a segment / everyone)
  6. Reversibility — can the harm be undone? (Reversible / partial / irreversible)

Priority is auto-calculated from Severity × Impact. Never manual.

What good triage looks like

Daily for the first week post-release, then twice-weekly. Fifteen minutes max. Three outputs only:

  • Severity — agreed by the triage attendees, not by the filer alone.
  • Chain levelwhich level should have caught this? Discussed briefly, recorded.
  • Owner — a name, not a team. "Esti owns triage of this; she may delegate the fix."

What triage does not do: solve, debate, design fixes. The fix happens after, in normal flow.

The chain level distribution is the diagnostic

The PO reads the chain-level distribution monthly. "Most defects keep tracing to Discovery" is a finding about the team's discovery practice, not about the QA team. "40% scenario-gap" means the amigos template is missing prompts. "25% observation-mismatch" means the briefs are thinner than they need to be.

The bug tracker is not a list of problems. It is a diagnostic instrument for the chain itself.

200apps · How We Work · NWIRE