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= Bug heat =

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Ascertaining the importance of a bug can be one of the harder parts of bug triage, right?

It's no problem if the project's relatively small and you're intimately involved with each bug but if you're helping to triage for a larger project, it's not always that easy.

Even if you're not directly involved in a project, it can be useful to get a quick estimate of a bug's likely impact.

== A calculated measure of a bug's significance ==

Launchpad aims to help you judge the significance of a bug by providing you with a guide to how "hot" the bug is.

Launchpad calculates bug heat by looking at thosefactors that are likely to suggest the bug requires your attention. For example:

 * the number of subscribers to the bug
 * whether the bug is marked is a security issue
 * the number of duplicates of the bug.

You can find [[https://dev.launchpad.net/Bugs/BugHeat#Algorithm|full details of how Launchpad calculates bug heat]] in our development wiki.

== Where to find bug heat ==

If you just want to see what heat Launchpad has assigned to a particular bug, you can find it towards the top-right of the bug page.

However, you can also sort bug listings by bug heat and bug heat is available in [[https://launchpad.net/+apidoc/|Launchpad's web services API]]. The Launchpad community plan to add more uses for and ways to access bug heat in the future.

= Next step =

Let's look at how Launchpad handles [[Bugs/Expiry|bugs that have gone stale]].

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