Bug Ratio
Work Mix & Quality Balance
ratio
Shows the proportion of bug work relative to combined bug and feature delivery.
💡 Like a firefighter's ratio, how much of your day is fighting fires versus building new capability.
What It Measures
Shows the proportion of bug work relative to combined bug and feature delivery.
Why It Matters
Spotting when quality work overwhelms feature development
Monitoring the balance between fixing issues and building new features
How It's Calculated
Divides bug tickets by the sum of feature and bug tickets, returning 0 if there are no feature or bug tickets.
bug_tickets ÷ (feature_tickets + bug_tickets) (returns 0 if denominator is 0)Concrete Example
If your team completed 15 features and 5 bugs, your bug ratio is 5 ÷ (15 + 5) = 0.25, meaning 25% of your combined feature and bug work is reactive.
What Does a Healthy Score Look Like?
Lower is better, high bug ratio signals quality debt consuming feature capacity.
Healthy
Under 0.15 (15% of feature+bug work is bugs)
Watch Out
0.15–0.30
Needs Attention
Over 0.30, bugs are dominating your delivery pipeline
What Moves This Metric?
Goes up when…
Product quality issues generating more bug reports than features shipped
Insufficient testing allowing defects to reach users
Complex codebase making features more likely to introduce regressions
Goes down when…
Improved test coverage and code review reducing defect rates
Dedicated quality-improvement initiatives
Better definition of done including QA sign-off before closing features
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