How can I track the frequency of bugs that are reported by request forms?
Hi everyone!
My team is starting to use Wrike's request forms as a bug logging tool. We allow the (internal) reporter to provide a detailed description, as well as select which subsystem(s) the bug affects. The bugs get created as tasks in a folder where the development team will triage each bug.
What I'd like to do now is track the frequency of recurring bugs. I'd like to be able to link new bug reports to existing bugs to increase the existing bugs' frequency of occurrence. E.g. there is already a known bug, "Robot doesn't like cats", and we receive many reports of "Robot won't pet cat", "Robot doesn't play with cats", etc. I want to be able to read the description of the bug and "assign" it as another occurrence of "Robot doesn't like cats".
My workaround thus far has been to assign these new bugs as successors of the original bug, but I still can't track each bug's # of predecessors without manually counting the # of successors. I thought about adding a list of recurring bugs to the request from itself so that the reporter can link the bugs and automatically update the frequency field of the original bug, but that seems inefficient.
How can I automate this process? What are other ways that teams have used Wrike to track frequency of occurrence of bugs?
Thanks for your help!
Hi Ayeda,
we have a similar use case for bug-reports and other tickets, and I usually add new tickets with a known issue as subtasks to an already existing one. It is manual work, and I think this is necessary because of the different descriptions of one bug, but it's quite easy to handle an also to track. You can easily read the number of subtasks in the parent task.
Kind regards
Florian
Thanks for the reply, Florian Kislich!
You're right - the manual work is often necessary anyway. I'm curious, how do you then visualize the # of subtasks data? Is that a manual process as well?
I should have mentioned that I'd like to use this "frequency" data to inform triaging activities. I'd really love to be able to sort the table view of the folder by "frequency" so that, if necessary, we can assign higher priority to the higher frequency items. I see that I can sort table views by the custom field "Frequency", but not by subtasks or successors. So perhaps I simply need to make it part of my manual process to verify that the Frequency value is always matching the number of subtasks?
I understand that you might not have all the answers, but it's nice to be able to pick your brain! Thank you!
Thanks for posting this, Ayeda Sayeed. I have a similar interest in this for our Customer Service team and will follow this post to see what comes up. This would help inform our product team with an additional data point as to which ECRs are most urgent.
Hi Ayeda!
- The number of subtasks is displayed by wrike in the task view. No need to do something.
- I think the frequency of a bug occourance is not the same as the number of reports. It also depends on the time between those reports.
- I prefer to sort the items manually, and I usually use the priority order function of wrike. For me it is the most easy way, as I can change the order very intuitive by drag'n'drop and I don't have to care if there would be many tasks with the same index.
- You could try to set up a custom number field where you put a "weight" for each report, usually "1", but possibly "0" if it's a double, or "2" if it's a major issue. Then you could set up a table where you let wrike calculate the sum of these fields, so you'll get a summed weight for each parent task. Then you could sort the tasks by this field. Additionally you could set up a filter that shows only the latest tasks, so your weight my not be affected by old bug reports.
Just some ideas of my brain 😉
Florian