5.1 Triage Rules of Thumb

Triaging new features and refactorings of old features is essentially the same process as triaging any new code. But we need to be sure to take the business value / importance and customer demands into account when deciding which category they fall into.

For example, imagine there's a typo in your list of prices. It's trivially easy to fix but it's critical that you do so and that you do so now. This is not only a bug but a critical bug. Considering how charging too much isn't that bad but charging too little can leave you hurting you might write a test that guarantees that no price will ever appear on your site that's below a certain threshold. Or maybe you can hook your billing system and test against exact pricing. All that because someone left off a zero.... an issue that would normally be minor but because of business concerns gets triaged as critical.

K. Rhodes 2007-05-18