Triage
Reviewing incoming bugs or incidents and deciding what happens to each, fix now, schedule, or won't-fix, based on severity, priority, and reproducibility. Triage keeps the backlog honest: without it every report sits at the same implicit urgency, and the genuinely critical items get lost in the noise of everything else that was filed.
Triage is the discipline that keeps a defect backlog from becoming a graveyard. Without it, every bug looks equally urgent and the loudest reporter wins; with it, severity (how bad) and priority (how soon) are assigned deliberately so engineering time flows to what actually matters. The hard part isn't the labels, it's doing triage often enough that the queue reflects reality, and being honest that "won't fix" is a legitimate, healthy outcome for most low-severity reports.