Bug triage flowchart template

Bug triage works best as a decision tree rather than a swimlane, because the hard part is the sequence of questions, not who is holding the ticket. We recommend following this process:

1. List every outcome a report can end at: closed, duplicate, needs info, and each priority band.
2. Write down the questions that separate those outcomes, and put the cheapest one first.
3. Turn each question into a decision node with both exits drawn, so no report can end without a decision.
4. Check that every path terminates. A tree with a dangling branch is where bugs go to disappear.
5. Draw the diagram in the tool your audience already uses. A free template removes most of the layout work.

Severity is how badly the bug behaves. Priority is how soon you will fix it. They are set by different people for different reasons, and confusing them is the most common failure in triage.

A crash in a feature three customers use is high severity and low priority. A cosmetic misalignment on the checkout page is low severity and high priority. This template asks both questions separately: critical severity first, then high impact, because a single "how urgent is it" field collapses two decisions into one and produces arguments instead of answers.

They are priority bands, and in this template each maps to a commitment rather than a feeling:

• P1: fix now, out of band. A hotfix that interrupts current work.
• P2: fix in the current sprint. Planned, but not interrupting.
• P3: backlog. Acknowledged, ranked, and not scheduled.

The value is that each band names what actually happens next. A priority scheme where P1 and P2 both mean "soon" is not a priority scheme.

Because severity is expensive to assess and reproducibility is not. Asking an engineer to judge the impact of a defect nobody has reproduced wastes the most costly time in the process on the least reliable information.

It also catches duplicates before they are ranked. Two people assessing the same underlying defect independently is how one bug ends up as a P1 and a P3 simultaneously.

They exit to request info or link duplicate rather than being closed or ranked. That is a deliberate middle state: the report is not rejected, but it does not enter the priority conversation until someone can reproduce it.

Most triage processes leave this branch undrawn, which is why unreproducible reports either get closed unfairly or sit in the backlog forever. Drawing it forces the question of who goes back to the reporter.

Bug triage decides what to fix and when. Incident triage restores service now. The difference matters in practice:

• A bug can wait; an incident cannot.
• Bug triage ends in a priority band; incident triage ends in a resolution.
• An incident often produces a bug afterwards, but not the other way round.

They are separate processes and deserve separate diagrams. IT and license administrators usually keep incident triage in a diagram of its own.

Every gate in the diagram should have a named owner, and they are not all the same person:

• Support or QA: validity and reproducibility, before engineering time is spent.
• Engineering: severity, because it is a technical judgement.
• Product: impact, because it is a business judgement.
• Whoever runs triage: the thresholds themselves, and the review of how often P1 is used.

PowerPoint can do it with SmartArt and the Shapes gallery, but the work is manual: you place each diamond yourself, label both exits, and reattach connectors every time something moves. For a tree with four gates and five endpoints, this becomes the reason the diagram stops getting updated.

A faster route is the Lucen Flowchart tab, which snaps connectors to shape anchors and reflows the diagram with Auto Layout when you add a branch. Either way, the result stays a set of native PowerPoint objects on your slide.

The download is a free .pptx made of native PowerPoint shapes, so anyone can open, read, and edit it, and you can share it as you would any deck; recipients need nothing installed.

The smart connectors, Auto Layout, and Lucen AI come from the Lucen Flowchart add-in, which adds a Lucen Flowchart tab to the ribbon and runs on Windows with PowerPoint 2016 or later and with PowerPoint for Microsoft 365. PowerPoint for the web, Mac, and mobile are not supported. Setup and troubleshooting steps are in Lucen Support.