Comparisons
Pairs that get conflated in real conversations. Neither column wins — what decides is the situation. Each record leads with the confusion, because the confusion is the reason the record exists.
Outcome vs outputFirst version vs prototypeDecision record vs one-pagerSuccess metric vs guardrailReversible vs irreversible decisionsFeature flag vs long-lived branchNumbers vs conversationsIncident vs bug
Incident vs bug
What people get wrong about this pair
Engineers treat incidents as bugs with urgency: fix the code, close the ticket. A product engineer treats an incident as a product event: who was affected, what did they lose, what do we tell them, and what do we owe them. The fix is one line of the response, not the response.
Incident
Use it when
When real people are losing something right now — money, data, trust, time — and someone has to decide and communicate.
Bug
Use it when
When the software is wrong and nobody is being hurt by it this minute.
| Aspect | Incident | Bug |
|---|---|---|
| First question | Who is affected and what did they lose? | What is wrong and how do we reproduce it? |
| Owner | Someone who can decide and communicate | Whoever picks up the ticket |
| Ends with | Users told, a postmortem, one change | A merged fix |
| Product cost | Trust, which comes back slowly | Usually none |