Introduction
The support team hosts bug scrubs to triage open Trac tickets for the Support Forum. Effectively triaging these Trac tickets allows us to address enhancements, feature requests, and bugs, to allow for continuous improvements to the support forums. During each scrub, we prioritize and organize tickets based on their urgency and impact.
All Make Teams follow the steps provided in this handbook for leading bug scrubs, however, this guide is specific to the Support Team.
Preparation
Approval and Assistance
If you’re looking to host a triage session and want some tips and advice, you can reach out to @vladt, who has experience hosting them. They can provide you with guidance and insights based on their previous experiences. It’s always beneficial to learn from someone who has hands-on experience in organizing such activities.
Additionally, make sure to inform the support representative of your plans so that they are aware of the triage session and can assist you in connecting with relevant individuals.
Getting tickets to be triaged
During the session, we only look at Support Tickets with a Normal priority, you can filter them as shown below.
During the scrub, we go over 10 tickets and these are picked in chronological order, but it’s also important to include any leftover tickets from the previous scrub. Reaching out to the previous host for information on any remaining tickets is a good approach to ensure that you have a complete and updated batch.
The link that you will share during the bug scrub to showcase the tickets you’ll be working on, needs to lead to the appropriate filtered view. This way, participants can focus on the specific tickets you’ll be addressing during the scrub.
You can use Ticket IDs to filter and create a link to the tickets you will be working on. To collect the ticket IDs locate the Ticket column.
When you have the ticket IDs you can use the ticket filter option, multiple IDs can be added to the filter by separating them with a comma.
Video showing how to view only specific tickets
The link provided after filtering out the tickets is the one you will share during the bug scrub.
Posting the Agenda
The agenda is posted on the Make WordPress site for the Support team; you can access the dashboard using this link. If you don’t have posting privileges, reach out to someone who can publish the agenda on your behalf or see if you can get authorization.
The agenda should follow this format. Some of the text can be adjusted to your preference but these basics should be included:
- Button with a link to the tickets you will be looking at during the session
- Add the session time in UTC using the Call Out info block.
- Mention the host
Once the agenda is posted, you can announce the triaging session during the support team meeting, during the open floor.
Hosting a Bug Scrub
I encourage you to go over the steps provided in the handbook before proceeding, the steps provided can be taken alongside what is suggested below when hosting a bug scrub.
After welcoming everyone to the meeting you can start sharing links to the tickets one by one. Participants can react with emojis to the tickets to reflect their opinion. Using reactions during a meeting or bug scrub can indeed be helpful for individuals who may not feel comfortable speaking out. Reactions provide a non-verbal way for participants to express their opinions, agreement, or support without needing to express it in words. They can use the following:
- ✅To confirm that the issue is still relevant, encourage folks to respond to the Trac tickets to help push them forward with this emoji.
- ❌Tickets that are no longer relevant and need to be closed i.e. the issue has been resolved, it’s a duplicate.
- 🚨Issues that need to be bumped up to a higher priority
The host should be a bit familiar with the tickets beforehand, try to write a small summary, especially on tickets with many comments). If there are any relevant related tickets worth mentioning you can include them in the summary.
TIP: You can read old conversations from previous bug scrubs about the ticket (trac links to the Slack conversation). But it’s totally fine to just mention the ticket and read it together with the other as well if you don’t have time for that beforehand.
The template below has some predefined text you can use during the bug scrub, additionally, you can see how previous bug scrubs went here.
Posting notes
You can post short notes to the agenda after the bug scrub. You can write in your preferred format, just keep in mind that you need to mention the following:
- Tickets handled during the scrub
- Which tickets were closed
- Tickets that have been bumped to a higher priority
For an example please feel free to go over this agenda.