Good defect management keeps teams focused on the right issues, prevents duplicate work, and preserves the investigation trail for future release reviews.
Use titles that describe the problem clearly.
Strong titles:
Use the description for steps to reproduce, expected behavior, actual behavior, and useful investigation notes.
Similar-defect suggestions help reduce duplicates. Before creating a new defect:
Use duplicate relationships carefully. Only one defect can be marked as the duplicate relationship for a defect.
Priority is urgency. Severity is impact.
Unassigned defects often stall. During triage:
Link defects to the work that explains them:
Remove incorrect links when they no longer apply. Removing a link does not delete the linked item.
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.
External issue links are useful when engineering work happens in Jira, GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps, or Linear.
Keep Hawzu traceability clean:
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.