Your app is flooded with user complaints about bugs. How do you decide which ones to fix first?
When your app is overwhelmed with bug reports, prioritizing fixes becomes crucial for maintaining user satisfaction. Focus on these strategies:
Which strategies have worked best for you in handling app bugs? Share your thoughts.
Your app is flooded with user complaints about bugs. How do you decide which ones to fix first?
When your app is overwhelmed with bug reports, prioritizing fixes becomes crucial for maintaining user satisfaction. Focus on these strategies:
Which strategies have worked best for you in handling app bugs? Share your thoughts.
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Based on the impact, severity, frequency and other aspects, I would do MoSCoW Analysis and accordingly pick the must haves first and so on.
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Use a Prioritization framework with numbers Score your bugs based on quality, quantity and persona (1-3) Quality -> Impact of the problem to the user journey. Which of these affect your key user journey or most active parts of the app. For Microsoft teams, this would be chat messaging or meetings Quantity -> How many people are measurably impacted by this specific problem. Persona -> Who is impacted by this problem? Is it a paid user or C-suite executive or just a random free user playing around with your app —- Multiply the score depending on the weight of each of these (1-3). This depends on your product (consumer vs enterprise) and the phase of your journey (early stage, v2, etc) —- Sort and fix
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Prioritize bugs based on severity, frequency, and user impact. Focus on crashes, security issues, and blockers for critical features first.
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1. Try to address the customer complaints first based on the severity. If that is not a blocker, inform the customer about it, and give them some tentative date. Blocker issue try to solve asap. 2. Sort the bugs based on again severity & impact. Run it through the product team and fix it. Do proper testing and release it as a hotfix. 3. Take preventive measure to avoid this in future. i) Do proper testing ii) Add unit & integration test cases iii) Run automation testing on daily basis and address the issues if any. iv) Do proper sprint demo by including product and engineering team to avoid last minute surprises.
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A great way is to triage into three or four categories, from completely preventing usage to cosmetic issues. Then tackle the ones that completely prevent usage first. Communication with all stakeholders is also key. Don't keep your users in the dark if you are aware of an incident and let them know when they can count on a resolution.
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In my POV, first of all I search for the bug that looks like a show blocker (The user can't use the app because of this bug) After that I go for the rest of the bugs.
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Prioritize bugs based on their impact on the user experience. If a bug stops users from using the app properly, fix it first. Keep an eye on common issues and check how many people are facing the same problem to decide what to fix next.
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Congratulations! There's something so valuable in your app that they still use it despite the bugs. Find out what that thing is. After that, prioritizing the bugs to fix will be straightforward. For example, let’s consider Spotify's core value: Letting users listen to the music they love, instantly. - Broken down on a high-level from the developers POV: 1. Can users find the music they love? 2. Can they stream it instantly? - Broken down further: 1. The number of users picking a song (e.g., from search) and listening for more than 5 seconds. 2. How quickly users can start playing the song (ideally under 200ms after clicking play). Then, assess the bugs based on how they affect these 2 key areas.
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Prioritize bugs by severity, frequency, and user impact. Fix critical issues like crashes or broken features first. Address high-frequency bugs affecting many users next. Communicate progress transparently to build trust and improve user satisfaction.
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Based on the impact on our and the user's business, I will triage the ticket status into Critical, High, Medium, and Low. From there, I will sort the issues into frequency buckets so we can tackle the most tracked issues first. Now, to solve the most frequent issues by low-hanging fruit, I will resort the frequency buckets into easy-to-solve topics so that we can solve them more quickly, which may cover the bulk of the issues faster. As a person who often plays the role of the "Sorting Hat", sometimes the whispers from the customer will tell me which bucket to put the issues into. I do not always agree, but the louder voices sometimes win over the criticality or frequency of the issue.
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