shahine.com/omar/

Jeff Atwood (who is becoming one of my favorite bloggers) has a great piece titled “Not All Bugs Are Worth Fixing”.

I have spent many months of my life in Triage Meetings. I consider myself pretty dammed good at it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bug come back to haunt me based on a decision that was made in Triage. However, if there ever had been, I’d be the first person to stand up and take accountability for the decision. I’ve seen many behaviors at work that I call CYA (Cover Your Ass) where people go out of their way to ensure that if anything goes wrong they are protected from any decision that may result in something bad. This is just the root of all evil and does a lot of damage to the team.

Triage can be a very tense and stressful environment. There are a few rules you can use to make it less painful:

1. Humor: no one wants to be there. Make it funny, have a good time and build a bond with your team mates
2. Publish out to the team when Triage is and who is expected/not expected to be there
3. Come prepared. If you don’t know your bug, go back to your office. Bring solutions not problems.
4. Focus on the customer impact, and the likelihood of the customer experiencing the problem.
5. Try and spend a small amount of time on each bug. Don’t rat hole.
6. Use clear language to talk about what bugs you will and won’t fix (we use terms such as LIKE and MUST to describe bugs). MUST = show stopper, LIKE = nice to have, but not recall class. As time goes on and you are trying to hit your Release Candidate you stop taking LIKE bugs.
7. Triage owns the final decision.