In September 2015, CareFusion issued emergency Class 1 recalls for its Alaris Syringe pumps. The pump was supposedly programmed to administer scheduled medical infusions to patients. As per official reports, due to a software code error (leading to a malfunction), the infusion pump could (or might already) have wrongly administered the scheduled medication, putting patient lives at risk. In response, the company issued recalls, regulators got involved, and the reputation damage was immediate. In a hospital setting, this could have led to a full blown catastrophe.
So, how did this happen? More importantly, here are the questions that mattered most:
- How long did that bug sit untriaged before it reached production?
- How many patients were affected while the bug was sitting in a backlog somewhere?
The delayed triage didn’t cause the bug, but it absolutely made the consequences exponential.
That’s the pattern we see everywhere: bugs that could’ve been fixed with a simple patch in the development or testing phases, when left unchecked, become multi-million-dollar mistakes (even threatening lives, like in healthcare) when they reach production. The gap between “Mean Time to Detect (MTTD)” and “Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR)” is almost always tied to how fast your triage process moves. And these gaps aren’t inefficiencies. They are expensive slip-ups that don’t always show up on the balance sheet.
The Money Part (Which Everyone Knows, but Let’s be Specific)
According to IBM System Sciences Institute research, the relative cost to fix a bug increases dramatically as they keep moving (unchecked) through SDLC. It says, “When you discover a bug during the design phase, the cost to fix them is your baseline. Find it during the implementation? That’s 6x more expensive. During testing? 15x more. And if it makes maintenance and production? Well, it costs a whopping 100x more to fix than what you’d have to shell out in the design phase.”
For Context: As per CISQ, the impact of poor software quality on the U.S. economy was estimated at approx. $2.08 trillion in 2020. This figure rose to a staggering $2.41 trillion by 2022. Building on this trend, Tricentis’ Quality Transformation Report(2025) said that four out of ten (40%) organizations suffer yearly losses exceeding $1 million due to poor software quality. Within the U.S., the problem is even more pronounced. Nearly 45% of companies reported annual losses greater than $5 million for the very same reason.
The financial setbacks, well, that’s just one dimension. There’s more.
What Slow Triage Really Costs (Other than Dollars)
Slow triage can create three specific drains that don’t show up in your spreadsheet or bug tracking tools. And this can absolutely wreck your team’s output. These include:
- Developer’s time and momentum loss
- No clarity on what to fix and when
- Context loss and morale decay over time
Developer’s Time and Momentum Loss
As per Rollbar market research, more than a third of developers (38% to be precise) spend up to 25% of their work time fixing bugs instead of writing code. Another 26% spend up to 50% of their time on bug fixes. Doing the math, 32% of developers report spending 10+ hours every week just triaging, reproducing, and bug fixing tasks. And these hours could go toward building the product, making improvements, or for working on what matters most.
When bugs aren’t triaged at the earliest, they just keep piling up in Jira backlogs without clear priority signals. As a result, devs can’t exactly wrap their heads around what to work on first.
For instance: A “critical bug” notification pops up in the developer’s bug tracker task list. So, the dev drops the current task to look into it. Halfway through, another team member asks the dev to look at a different issue. There’s the context-switch again. By half-day, the developer had jumped between 4 different tasks. None of them with clear ownership or timeline. And this switching doesn’t happen for free.
- A research from UC Irvine shows that devs need an average of 23 mins to fully get back into their focus zone after an interruption. And it’s not just time.
- Research by Amoroso d’Aragona et al. found that interrupted code sessions lead to lower code quality, more bugs, and longer code review cycles. As a result, devs lose the cognitive context and clarity to prioritize.
To sum up, here’s what the cycle looks like: Late triage —> Unclear priorities —> Interrupted work —> Context switches —> 23+ min recovery per switch —> productivity loss —> Lower code quality —> Repeat
No Clarity on What to Fix and When
Let’s look at a few critical questions that triage meetings largely aims to clarify:
- What’s broken
- Why does it matter
- Who owns fixing it
With delayed triages, these answers become murky, often leading to improper defect prioritization. And this often leads to release delays, resource misallocation, and spiralling costs. However, the real damage is in “what doesn’t get fixed” and “what gets worked on instead”.
Without proper priority signals (due to slow or delayed triages), developers’ clarity further goes down the pit. So, they either work randomly (fixing whatever they come across) or wait for someone to tell them. Meanwhile,
- The backlog grows.
- Three-month-old bugs sit untouched while new ones arrive daily.
- Nobody knows if the old bugs still matter. Was the login issue that was reported 90 days ago fixed? Does it still affect customers? Is it blocking other work?
And it doesn’t end here.
- According to a research paper from the University of Texas, Austin, “For long-lived bugs (bugs not fixed within one year), the average assignment delay was more than one year, and the average fix time after assignment was another year”.
- The same paper stated that 40% of long-lived bugs only needed small fixes. Yet, they remain buried in backlogs for years simply because their importance was never clarified upfront.
These long-lived bugs trigger a phenomenon known as “Code Rot“. When a bug isn’t triaged and fixed quickly, the rest of the system continues to grow around it. New features built on top of this buggy behavior. Eventually, the bug becomes “load-bearing“.
Developers eventually stop trying to fix the original issue. Instead, they unknowingly write “workarounds” to bypass it. And by the time you finally triage that old ticket, the stakes have changed.
Simply put, a fix that would have taken 10 mins in the 1st month now requires a massive refactor in the 12th month. This happens because too many other components now depend on that “broken” logic to function.
Context Loss + Morale Decay Over Time
This is another significant drain that software teams often face due to slow triages. As bugs sit untriaged and unresolved, the original context, both technical and emotional, slowly vanishes over time. In simple terms, this is what practically happens:
- The QA who reported the bug moves on.
- This developer who could understand the complexity and debug is occupied with other tasks.
- The person who understood its business impact shifted focus.
- The product owner who could explain why it mattered is in different meetings.
What remains is a stale ticket with vague notes and with no-urgency to prioritize. And over time, this decay snowballs into team dissatisfaction and burnout. This is backed by a study by Deloitte. It says 91% of developers report stress and frustration directly affecting their work quality. Following the trend, teams dealing with unmanaged bug backlogs showed a 31% drop in developer satisfaction scores directly correlated with backlog size.
The Bottom Line
Bugs don’t just sit in your backlog; they grow. Every day a critical issue remains untriaged, it effectively “collects interest” in the form of technical debt and team frustration. And you are eventually forced to pay that debt, but with a massive penalty. In software, the ticking clock is the greatest amplifier of risk.
If you triage today, you’d spend minutes and a few dollars to fix a contained issue. If you triage next year, you spend weeks and thousands of dollars to perform “surgery” on a system that has grown around the rot.
What matters is to don’t let your backlog become a stockpile of context and morale. What works best is to close the gap between “we found it” and “we care about it“. Your balance sheet and your team will thank you.
