Bug or Feature Request? One Question Sorts It

The question

Is the product doing something it already promised to do?

• No — it is broken. That is a bug. Something documented, shipped, or clearly implied is not working.
• Yes, it works — someone wants it to do more. That is a feature request.

That is the whole test. This page is a sorting guide — not a live interactive widget. Edge cases are rarer than the arguments about them, and the two you will actually meet are:

• "It works but it is confusing." If a normal user cannot complete a task the product claims to support, treat it as a bug. Silent failure is still failure.
• "It used to work." Always a bug. Regressions are not requests.

Why the sorting matters more than the label

The two lists behave in opposite ways, and the mistake is running one workflow over both.

Bugs should trend to zero. They are sorted by severity and how many people hit them. A bug list that stays full is a bug list nobody triages.

Feature requests never trend to zero, and should not. They are demand plus judgment. A full ideas board is a healthy one.

So put them on two boards with two workflows:

	Bugs	Feature requests
Sorted by	severity, frequency	demand, judgment
Voting	off	on
Healthy state	trending to zero	always full
Closing means	fixed	shipped, or an honest no

Turn voting off on bugs

This is the part teams get wrong, and it is the most expensive mistake on this page.

Put a bug on a voting board and it has to campaign. A crash that hits nine people at 3am gets three votes; a colour-scheme complaint gets forty. Now your defect queue is sorted by popularity, and the crash sits under the colour scheme.

Severity is not a democracy. Turn voting off on the bug board and sort it the way bugs are meant to be sorted.

The reverse is just as bad. File a wishlist item as a critical bug and your tracker becomes a lobbying channel — the loudest requester learns which word gets a same-day response.

Sort first, then score

Once the two lists are separate, they get scored differently too: bugs by severity and blast radius, ideas by RICE if you have the vote counts, or ICE if you do not yet.

Try Feedjolt

Feedjolt gives you both boards in one workspace, with voting on the ideas board and off on the bug board — and moving a post between them when someone files it in the wrong place. When you close a request, the changelog can post itself and the people who voted hear back.

The embeddable widget is on the free plan, so a bug can be filed at the moment someone hits it.

Two boards, two workflows — start a Feedjolt workspace and keep bugs and ideas on the right lists.

Also on this site: RICE calculator and ICE calculator for scoring after you sort.