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Planning & Processnoun|verb · /ˈtriːɑːʒ/

triage

In simple English

Triage comes from medical emergency rooms, where doctors quickly assess patients to determine who needs treatment first. In tech companies, the concept applies to managing bugs, incidents, and feature requests. When a production issue occurs, your team performs triage to understand its impact: Does it affect all users or just some? Is revenue at risk? Can it wait until tomorrow or does it need fixing in the next hour? Triage happens in daily standups, incident response, sprint planning, and code review processes. It is not about fixing the problem immediately — it is about evaluating severity and deciding priority. A critical production outage gets triaged as P0 or P1 (highest priority), while a minor UI typo might be P3 or P4 (lower priority). Engineers use triaged tickets to plan their work efficiently. This term is essential in modern software development because teams receive far more requests than they can handle. Triage ensures resources go to what matters most first, preventing chaos and keeping the product stable.

Understanding how to assess and prioritize bugs and tasks by severity in software development.

At a glanceCEFR B2
Commonness4/5
Versatility4/5
FormalityCasualFormalNeutral
Spoken ↔ WrittenSpokenWrittenBoth
Directness ↔ DiplomaticDirectDiplomaticDirect
RegionUS and UK
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Say it like this

✓Let us triage this issue in the standup
✓We need to triage the backlog before sprint planning
✓The team triaged the bugs and marked three as critical

Real examples

in a standup

"We have three new bugs reported this morning. Let us triage them quickly to see which ones block the release."

in a code review

"I found a performance issue in this PR, but we should triage it separately since it does not affect the current feature."

in a team meeting

"The triage meeting determined that the authentication failures are P1, so everyone shifts focus to that today."

Don't say this

Handle with care. Avoid using triage to mean simply fixing or solving — it specifically means assessing priority and severity first, not the action itself.

✕We triaged the server issue and fixed it immediately.
✓We triaged the server issue and determined it was critical, then fixed it immediately.— Triage is the assessment step, not the fix itself. You triage first, then act based on the priority.
✕Can you triage this feature request?
✓Can you triage this feature request and let me know the priority?— The full action of triage includes assigning priority or severity level, not just looking at something.
✕Triage the documentation is low priority.
✓Triaging the documentation shows it is low priority.— Triage needs a clear object (what are you triaging?) and usually a result (what priority did it get?).

Other forms

noun

triage

"The triage process helped us focus on the most critical bugs first."

verb

triage

"We triage all incoming support tickets every morning."

verb (past tense)

triaged

"The team triaged five incidents yesterday and resolved two of them."

verb (gerund)

triaging

"Triaging issues by severity helps us allocate resources effectively."

Often used with

triage meetingA formal meeting where the team assesses and prioritizes issues together
triage processThe standard steps a team follows to evaluate and rank problems
triage queueA list or backlog of items waiting to be assessed for priority
triage issuesThe most common verb phrase; assessing bugs or problems by severity
triage ticketsEvaluating support or task management items to determine urgency
triage bugsAssessing reported defects to decide which to fix first

Similar words

prioritizeBroader term meaning to decide importance; triage is more specific to assessing severity in emergencies or backlogs
assessGeneral term for evaluation; triage includes both assessment and assignment of priority level
categorizeSimply grouping items; triage includes judgment about urgency and impact, not just sorting

Opposites

ignorebacklog indefinitely

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Practice

Try it

4 quick exercises

Pick the most natural phrasing

1. Your production database is slow. What do you say in the incident channel?

Complete the sentence

2. Before we start fixing bugs, we should _______ them to understand which ones are most critical.

Spot the mistake

3. Which sentence uses triage incorrectly?

Rewrite naturally

4. Rewrite this in natural tech English using triage: We need to look at all these problems, decide which ones are the most serious, and then pick which ones our team will work on first.

Questions

Quick poll

Have you said "triage" in a standup this week?

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