Every once in a while I thought I’d share a little about the software business itself. It’s a fun and intriguing business. The software industry loves its acronyms and vernacular, oftentimes borrowed from other industries. Today I’ll tell you a little about triage.
For those of you who remember M*A*S*H, you’ll recall that triage is the process that trauma doctors employ to figure out which patients to treat. As callous as it sounds, patients are divided into three groups:
A) those who will survive regardless of what the medics do
B) those will survive only if provided appropriate medical treatment
C) those will die regardless of what the medics do
Before a big launch or release, software companies will sometimes employ triage. All of the outstanding bugs are divided into three groups:
A) those bugs that are minor enough to ignore for now
B) those bugs that are severe and should be fixed before launch
C) those bugs that can’t be fixed before launch even if you wanted to
Often the bug buckets are labeled “won’t fix,” “should fix” and “can’t fix” respectively. Each day the bugs are triaged by a small group of people – usually the scrum product owner and one engineer.
The engineering team focuses on fixing all of the bugs in the middle “should fix” bucket. If they drain the “should fix” bucket, then they’ll move on to the “won’t fix” bucket.
