Not every software bug is a catastrophe. Some bugs are spiders — unsettling, but manageable. A button that's slightly the wrong shade of blue? Spider. A typo in a footer that's been there for three years? Spider. These get logged, prioritized, and fixed eventually. But some bugs are bears. A bug that lets users see each other's private data? Bear. A bug that wipes your saved progress? Absolute bear. QA testers spend as much time classifying bugs as they do finding them.

You already do severity triage without realizing it. "The dishwasher is making a new sound" is a spider. "The dishwasher is leaking onto the floor" is a bear. The skill is in resisting the urge to treat everything as a bear — or everything as a spider. At work, when something goes wrong, try asking two questions before reacting: how bad is the actual impact, and how urgently does it need to be fixed? Those are different questions, and the answers aren't always the same.

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Until next time,
Tina
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