Do you spend your time researching and debugging bugs that aren’t really bugs? They turn out to be misconfigurations, or the system functions as designed, but perhaps not as this customer expects? How do you improve the quality of the bugs you get, so that you don’t spend time trying to track down false positives?
Quite often, this starts with a good and knowledgeable support organization. They need to know the app forward and backward, inside and out. Then, because they know the app and what it does so well, they can start to spot the false positives as soon as they come in, and can help to train the customers as to how the system actually behaves and is designed to be used. They perhaps also will have more empathy towards the customers using the app everyday too, and be able to offer useful suggestions for improvements, rather than filing bug reports for things that are not really bugs. When we see a bug, we are in a “fix-it” mode, and generally aren’t looking at a larger picture of business flow, so we may miss simple things, such as hiding a button until it is valid to be clicked on, or re-arranging a page to make the UI clearer. These may be things that people in the support organization can correlate and see, and raise up through the appropriate channels.
That may be enough to weed out a great many of the low-quality bugs, but some may still filter through. At this point, the bugs may not necessarily be false positives, but jus misdirected. It may be a valid bug, but not in your area of the application. Perhaps it is a problem with an environment configuration, or another team’s service, or an external system. A good triage system needs to not only weed out the false positives, but also needs to know how to direct real issues to the teams that are best equipped to handle those issues.
If your application itself is a good team player, it can even help you find high quality bugs. It can tell you when things are going wrong, when processes are not keeping up with work volumes, or unexpected input comes in, or external systems are down. We don’t usually allow the app to be a good team player though, and quite often make it this noisy 18 month-old that can barely walk, can’t really talk coherently, but is very noisy and leaves you with soiled diapers to change constantly.