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Defects Best Practices

2 min read

Good defect management keeps teams focused on the right issues, prevents duplicate work, and preserves the investigation trail for future release reviews.

Write Actionable Defects

Section titled “Write Actionable Defects”

Use titles that describe the problem clearly.

Strong titles:

  • Name the failing behavior
  • Avoid vague phrases
  • Stay short enough to scan in the table

Use the description for steps to reproduce, expected behavior, actual behavior, and useful investigation notes.

Check Similar Defects Before Creating

Section titled “Check Similar Defects Before Creating”

Similar-defect suggestions help reduce duplicates. Before creating a new defect:

  • Review suggested matches
  • Open details when a suggestion looks relevant
  • Link as related when the issues are connected
  • Link or close as duplicate when the new defect repeats an existing issue

Use duplicate relationships carefully. Only one defect can be marked as the duplicate relationship for a defect.

Use Priority And Severity Separately

Section titled “Use Priority And Severity Separately”

Priority is urgency. Severity is impact.

  • Use High priority when the team should act quickly.
  • Use Blocker or Critical severity when the issue meaningfully affects product use, testing, or release confidence.
  • Avoid raising both values unless both urgency and impact are truly high.

Keep Ownership Clear

Section titled “Keep Ownership Clear”

Unassigned defects often stall. During triage:

  • Assign a clear owner
  • Add a due date for time-sensitive work
  • Use Assigned to Me, Unassigned, and Needs Triage filters to keep ownership visible
  • Add notifiers for stakeholders who need updates

Maintain Traceability

Section titled “Maintain Traceability”

Link defects to the work that explains them:

  • Test cases show what exposed the issue.
  • Executions and test runs show where it happened.
  • Releases show milestone impact.
  • Requirements show business or acceptance impact.

Remove incorrect links when they no longer apply. Removing a link does not delete the linked item.

Section titled “Use Related And Duplicate Links”

Related defects help teams understand patterns. Duplicate links help avoid repeated work.

Use related links for similar symptoms, shared root causes, or connected investigation paths. Use duplicate links when one defect represents the same issue as another.

Section titled “Link External Issues Intentionally”

External issue links are useful when engineering work happens in Jira, GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps, or Linear.

Keep Hawzu traceability clean:

  • Link only relevant external issues
  • Unlink incorrect external issues
  • Remember that unlinking removes the Hawzu connection, not the external issue

Use Comments And History During Triage

Section titled “Use Comments And History During Triage”

Use comments for investigation notes, decisions, and handoff details. Use history to verify what changed before making major updates.

Reactions and replies help keep discussion lightweight without losing the record.

Next Steps

Section titled “Next Steps”