"How do you prioritize bugs?"
Not all bugs are equal. This tests your ability to triage effectively, communicate with stakeholders, and make pragmatic decisions about quality.
Distinguish between severity (technical impact) and priority (business urgency).
Describe your triage framework or matrix.
Explain how you involve stakeholders in prioritization.
Share an example of a tough prioritization decision.
I use a severity-priority matrix. Severity measures technical impact: S1 is data loss or security breach, S2 is major feature broken, S3 is minor feature issue, S4 is cosmetic. Priority measures business urgency: how many users are affected, revenue impact, and workaround availability. A high-severity low-priority bug might be a crash in a rarely used feature; a low-severity high-priority bug might be a typo on the pricing page. I triage with product managers daily, keeping a shared dashboard. In my last role, I implemented this framework and reduced our average resolution time by 40% because engineers focused on what truly mattered rather than working on bugs in FIFO order.
Show you think about business impact, not just technical severity.
Mention stakeholder collaboration — triage is not a solo activity.
Demonstrate pragmatism: not every bug needs to be fixed immediately.
Severity is the technical impact level. Priority is business urgency. A critical crash in an unused feature is high severity but low priority. A minor UI bug on the checkout page is low severity but high priority.
Ideally a collaboration between QA, product, and engineering. QA assesses severity, product assesses business impact, and together they set priority.
Maintain a "won't fix" or "accepted risk" category. Review periodically. If a low-priority bug keeps getting reported by users, its priority should be reassessed.
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