Bug Triage Template for Agile Teams

Severity measures the technical impact of the bug (how broken is it?). Priority measures when to fix it (how urgently does the business need it resolved?). A cosmetic bug on the login page of your largest enterprise customer might be low severity but high priority. An S0 bug affecting only internal test accounts might be high severity but medium priority. Separate the two so your team can make nuanced trade-offs.

At minimum: a product manager, an engineering lead, and a QA lead or senior engineer. If bugs are flowing in from support, include a support team lead or have them submit pre-triaged bug reports before the meeting. Keep the group to 4-6 people. Larger groups slow down decision-making and turn triage into a status meeting.

Give unreproducible bugs two chances. If the reporter cannot provide clear reproduction steps after a follow-up, and QA cannot reproduce after 3 attempts across environments, mark the bug as "Cannot Reproduce" and close it. Add a note explaining the reproduction attempts. If the same issue is reported again by a different source, reopen and re-investigate with the new context.

No. Use one unified severity scale based on customer impact, not technical domain. A frontend bug that prevents all users from logging in is S0 regardless of whether it is a CSS issue or a JavaScript error. A backend bug that corrupts data is also S0. The customer does not care which layer is broken. Unified severity definitions prevent cross-team arguments about relative importance.

Weekly works for most teams. During a major release or incident aftermath, shift to daily 15-minute standups focused on new and aging bugs. If your bug inflow is under 10 per week, biweekly triage is sufficient. The cadence should match your bug volume and sprint length. If bugs age in the queue for more than one triage cycle, increase the frequency. ---