What is the best way to triage JIRA bugs?

Douglas Linder1

People keep putting bugs in the correct project, but labelling them incorrectly.

For example it's not uncommon to see something like 'Missing link to pdf' categorised as 'Critical' in the project.

It's wasting a lot of my time going through and correcting these manually.

Currently I'm leaning towards making all bugs mandatorily 'trivial' when created, and then manually triaging them up to minor / major / critical / blocker if required, and having any bug which has not been touched in 14 days closed as 'won't fix' (seriously, if the reporter of the bug isn't making noise about it and no one has touched it in 2 weeks, its irrelevant).

This still seems like it'll waste time, but at least we won't have an endless wave of unimportant stuff filling the 'major'+ bug lists.

Can anyone suggest a better work flow for this?

Are there some plugins that somehow help manage this?

Ivar

First of all I would never not consider the issues created by the users. A bug that "the user is not making any noise about" can just as well be the first indication that you have performance issues, data inconsistency issues or any other "top of the iceberg" symptom that indicate that something is very very wrong. Or it can be user error

Thing is - creating bugs will always be subjective to peoples feelings there and then. From your point of view, the missing link to the pdf is minor to trivial. To the user, not getting access to the pdf there and then, especially if this was something he/she needed right now, is major (or worse).

From my point of view, all issues created in Jira needs to be considered one by one. If you are spending a lot of time on this and it is not really not in your work description, I would suggest that you take it up with your boss. You should be happy that the users actually create issues in Jira instad of you having to follow up on e-mail created issues with all of their mess (like signatures, pictures in signatures, long comments as the mail grow more and more).

If you want an easy way out to downgrade or upgrade issues - consider adding a button (transition) where you can change the category without going into "edit-mode".

... and changing default to something else than major seems like a good idea. Personally, with my understanding of english beeing norwegian and all, I feel that the default "out-of-the-box" with Major as default is a bit to much to have a default.