bobzimuta

I'm looking for perspectives (or resources) on whether engineers or trained support staff should be the front-line on bugs. I've seen engineers perform front-line triage in both corporate environments and small but established companies.

The typical situation we have is a support member thinks there's an issue, and posts this 'raw' issue to Slack. The engineer on-call for the week responds and either resolves the issue or creates a ticket for follow up.

We could continue with this process, or train support staff to triage and submit formalized (repro steps, confirm whether widespread) bugs to the on-call engineer.

What's worked for you? Please share rough company size for context.

Also looking for readings on best practices.

Curious about your company's on-call for details about:

* expected duties (only answer on-call, do other work, etc)

* how deep does your on-call dive into code to fix, vs triaging, patching, and creating follow up work to fix permanently?

* priority order of work (on-call tickts vs regular work vs existing on-call tickets vs special queue of simple tasks)

* what happens when the current on-call can't complete in time?

* how do you manage for other teams' risk? (ie their api goes down, you can't satisfy your customers)

* any other tidbits