Optimizing Software Quality: The Power of Defect Triage

Defect triage is the backbone of efficient software development, acting as a critical response for assessing, prioritizing, and resolving defects throughout your SDLC. It helps ensure that all bugs, errors, and other issues are correctly identified and addressed, allowing teams to make a better end product.

However, defect triage isn’t as simple as logging and resolving bugs. It’s a process that involves everyone who’s part of the pipeline — namely your dev team, QA team, and DevOps. It impacts them all in different ways, and if they don’t work together and collaborate efficiently, it can quickly become a significant issue for your organization.

Defect Triage in the Software Development Pipeline

When we talk about defect triage, we don’t just mean the constant meetings about issues on a release. We also mean how it affects teams throughout the pipeline — from your devs to your CI team. As you move down the software pipeline, your teams must maintain efficient collaboration to ensure defects get the attention they need and share the responsibilities to catch and resolve them.

As we explore the pipeline, we’ll show you how these different team members can contribute to reducing defects and assisting your triage operations for a faster, more efficient defect triage process.

Pre-merge Phase: Developers and Unit Tests

Before any code hits the pipeline, your devs work on code and writing tests. They’re the first line of defense at catching and logging defects as they work and should be fixing them before they travel down the pipeline when possible. They’re also responsible for fixing defects after they’ve been caught further down the stream and giving insight into these defects during triage meetings.

To keep defects to a minimum, dev teams should write unit tests for their code as they go along. However, speed is the name of the game here — they’ll need to be able to run these tests quickly to ensure they can make fixes without breaking anything else and push changes as a gut check before pushing them to the main branch.

Post-Merge Phase: QA and UI Tests

Once code has been tested and pushed, it’s time for your QA to do its namesake: assure its quality. Once it’s passed basic functionality tests, your QA team must dive deep into the code to ensure it works as expected when connected. That means big test suites and UI testing and getting a comprehensive look at your application.

Your QA team should be front and center when it comes to weighing in on how these defects affect your product as a whole — are they an immediate issue, how do they affect the user experience, and does it stop production? Then, once dev teams have fixed those issues, QA teams can verify nothing new has sprung up in their place.

The CI Pipeline

Your DevOps team is at the helm of your CI pipeline. They’re the ones managing the builds of your product, and they need to keep tabs on defects that stop them from deploying changes. They’ll also need to ensure that the environments everyone uses are all appropriately configured so everyone has access to an identical workspace for development, testing, and production.

Defect Triage Hurdles for Developers, QA, and CI 

When it comes to the dev team actively working within defect triage, they’ll need to clearly understand why some issues are prioritized and how to solve them. This sounds easy initially, but it can get stressful fast once you add time into the mix. If they don’t have adequate information about the issues they’re working on, they’ll only add more fuel to the fire. Without enough information and time, any fixes they add may just add more problems down the line, or critical issues may go unresolved.

QA teams are frequently caught in the triage crossfire. They have to deal with all of the bugs that get reported, including from the dev team. And if these bug reports aren’t detailed enough, your QA team will struggle to identify and reproduce them, which can cause a massive bottleneck in the system. And don’t forget they also need to keep all of their testing within the project's time constraints — which can become an even bigger issue when defects run rampant.

Your DevOps team is responsible for ensuring your CI works as intended, both reliably and efficiently. They also need to ensure that everyone uses the proper environments so both QA and Dev teams can collaborate and reproduce these defects. Your DevOps team can also create and employ strategies to help reduce your overall testing time and help facilitate the entire triage process, keeping everyone in the loop and equipped with the necessary tools.

Automating Defect Triage with Launchable

While defect triage often feels like a toss-up between a nuisance and a garbage fire, it doesn’t have to be. By employing tools like Launchable, you can make it a surgical strike every time with the power of automation.

Automated Issue Grouping

By intelligently grouping similar issues, Launchable helps simplify your triage process. Our machine learning algorithms analyze your data and help spot common patterns across your bug reports. That way, your QA team can spend less time trying to sift through reports and more time fixing them alongside your dev team.

Comprehensive Test History

We keep a detailed record of all your tests and how they perform over time (including pass rates and failure patterns) to give you a better idea of your test suites. It helps your QA and dev teams gain insight into the stability and reliability of your test suites, so they can more effectively solve these issues. They’re also equipped with the data they need to make informed decisions about recurring issues or appropriately mark the priority of defects, dramatically speeding up your entire triage (and testing) process!