Bug Triage Automation: Streamlining Issue Prioritization

Bug triage is an essential part of software development, but it can be a slow and manual. It requires human judgment for decision-making, which means there’ll always be some form of bias (and manual effort). It means that devs, QA teams, and other project stakeholders all need to have their hands in the cookie jar to make sure they understand what’s going on and their own requirements.

And when both teams and projects grow, this manual effort quickly grows from a speed bump to a slog. As you expand, your bug triage process only gets more intricate — so how do you manage to keep it under control?

Bug Triage Automation

Bug Triage is a process that prioritizes, tracks, and evaluates bugs during software development, and it’s a critical part of your software development lifecycle. Not only does it help squash bugs that affect software quality and performance, but it also helps teams prioritize the most critical ones first.

And, of course, automation can help dramatically speed up this process. With automation tools, your teams can cut out some manual effort while improving the consistency of how bugs are discovered and reported. Plus, they help streamline the entire defect management process, giving your teams much-needed breathing room to tackle these issues.

Three Ways to Automate Your Bug Triage

If you need a quick refresher, let’s go over the basics of the bug triage process:

1. Discovery and categorization - Bugs are found throughout the development phase as devs work. A report is made for each one, detailing how to replicate it, what the bug is, and what tests it doesn’t pass. Once a report is made, it’s assigned a category and prioritized based on its severity. After that, it’s assigned to be investigated and resolved.

2. Resolution - After it’s been assigned, the bug is worked on by a developer to find a resolution. This could be as simple as flagging it as a duplicate report, but will most likely require some hands-on effort to resolve. It may be recategorized if it’s too complex (or not impactful enough to prevent release), but in most cases, it’ll be resolved and moved to the next step.

3. Verification and retesting - If the bug was fixed in the previous step, it’ll move from the dev team to the QA team to ensure it’s fully resolved. Here, it will be thoroughly tested to ensure no other issues arise and either be closed or sent back to the team based on its success.

As you can see, it’s a pretty manual process from start to finish. But what if it didn’t have to be? How can adding automation speed up and improve this heavy-handed cycle?

Filter Away Noise

The bug triage process gives your teams a ton of information to deal with — logs, reports, failures, tests, and more. Trying to sift through all of this can be incredibly daunting, creating a huge mental strain on your team (and a serious information overload).

Dealing with tons of test failures means your teams need to sift through to find out what the immediate issues are. Not all of these failures are important information, either. These nuisances can create a ton of noise in your system that helps hide the root of the problem.

Flaky tests can gum up the system too — false positives and test issues can eat up the time and resources that you need. They can stop teams in their tracks and prevent them from deep-diving into the real issues that affect your software quality.

By adding automation tools, you can help filter out all of the noise that’s gumming up your pipeline. Automation can simplify the whole bug triage process for categorization and prioritization without causing a hassle for your team. And with that streamlined process, critical bugs can be discovered and solved before they impact your delivery timeline.

Analyze the Problem

Remember all those logs? Countless lines of text telling your team every single detail of your test results can be a huge drag on your team — nobody wants to manually read every line. Thankfully, AI tools can help analyze and identify these issues without bogging down your team.

Combining endless error logs can significantly slow down your delivery pipeline, preventing updates and major software releases. All of which can make a huge impact on project delivery timelines and overall customer satisfaction. But with AI and automation, your teams can sniff out and eliminate recurring issues, flaky tests, and non-critical bugs. That way, your teams can focus on mission-critical issues and keep everything running smoothly.

Raise Awareness

With a slew of bugs for your teams to deal with, it’s hard to see the forest for the trees sometimes. Major issues can blend into the sea of bug reports, and even with proper prioritization, getting everyone on the same page can be difficult. By doing everything manually, your teams must constantly monitor systems to spot issues, which eats up time from other essential tasks.

You’ll also need to keep everyone in the loop, too, which is a challenge on its own. Ensuring everyone is informed and knows what’s being worked on (and what to work on) isn’t easy. But with AI and automation, you can notify the right team members so they can pass the information along and cut down on notification fatigue while speeding up software releases.

Automate Bug Triage with Launchable

Launchable offers a way to transform your defect triage from a sluggish, manual effort into a sleek, streamlined system that can bring your teams to new heights. And with our Intelligent Test Failure Diagnostics, you’ll crush any bug your team encounters.

Evolve error logs into detailed insights.

Our platform ingests your test’s raw error logs and spits out intricate, concise insights that can highlight the issue's root — and how to solve it. It allows your teams to determine if issues are repeat issues and can give you context into how it should be prioritized, speeding up your software delivery pipeline.

All your tests live in one centralized location, so teams can collaborate and solve recurring bugs before they confuse and distract your team from bigger problems. Plus, Launchable uses all of this data to help solve issues going forward by creating and maintaining detailed test case results.