One of the things that I see going by the wayside in most places is the bug triage process.  The step of taking incoming issues and validating them and prioritizing them. It’s a real shame when that happens; both of those functions are important. Establishing the priority of the defect relative to the existing work is arguably the more important for delivering the most value per unit time. However, validating the issue is the single most useful thing that can be done. It provides two main benefits. First, it makes sure that the issue is ready to be worked, that it’s not going to waste the time of people downstream in the process trying to figure out what the problem is. Secondly, it’s the quality assurance on the quality insurance process.

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