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Cortex Bug Review Execution Plan

This plan is for working through the Opus full-stack audit output in a consistent, decision-ready way.

Goals

  • Turn findings into prioritized, verifiable fixes.
  • Balance urgency (risk reduction) with delivery reality (team capacity and dependencies).
  • Prevent regressions by pairing each fix with test and observability updates.

Inputs

  • docs/bug/opus-full-stack-review-prompt.md output report
  • Current sprint capacity and ownership map
  • Production incident history and support ticket trends
  • Existing roadmap constraints

Triage Rubric

Use these dimensions for every issue: - Likelihood (1-5) - Impact (1-5) - Exploitability (1-5) - Blast Radius (1-5) - Detectability (1-5, inverse: hard to detect = higher score) - Confidence (1-5) - Effort (S | M | L) - Time Criticality (Now | This Sprint | Next Sprint | Backlog)

Priority Formula

Priority Score = (Likelihood * Impact) + Exploitability + Blast Radius + Detectability + Confidence

Severity bands: - Critical (>= 30) - High (24-29) - Medium (17-23) - Low (<= 16)

Workflow

  1. Ingest
  2. Import all findings into one working table.
  3. Deduplicate overlapping issues.
  4. Validate
  5. Reproduce top findings (Critical/High) in a controlled environment.
  6. Mark confidence adjustments after reproduction.
  7. Prioritize
  8. Apply scoring rubric and assign severity.
  9. Add business context: customer-facing risk, compliance, revenue, operational risk.
  10. Plan
  11. Group by dependencies and shared root causes.
  12. Split into phases (containment, near-term fixes, systemic hardening).
  13. Execute
  14. Create implementation tickets with owner + acceptance criteria.
  15. Add tests and rollout safeguards for each issue.
  16. Verify
  17. Confirm fixes with test matrix and runtime validation.
  18. Close only when acceptance criteria and monitoring checks pass.
  19. Learn
  20. Capture root-cause patterns and prevention actions in engineering standards.

Working Table Template

Use this schema in your tracker:

Issue ID | Title | Layer | Severity | Priority Score | Likelihood | Impact | Exploitability | Blast Radius | Detectability | Confidence | Effort | Owner | Status | Dependency IDs | Target Milestone | Fix PR | Test PR | Validation Evidence | Notes

Suggested status values: - New - Needs Repro - Triaged - Planned - In Progress - In Review - Validated - Closed - Deferred

Phase Plan Template

Phase 0: Immediate Containment (24-48h)

  • Target: all Critical findings and exploit-prone High findings.
  • Actions:
  • Temporary guards, kill switches, tighter permissions, rate limits, config lockdown.
  • Incident alerts and monitoring patches.
  • Exit criteria:
  • Immediate blast radius reduced.
  • Runbooks updated for on-call response.

Phase 1: High-Value Fixes (1-2 weeks)

  • Target: remaining High findings and top Medium findings tied to key user flows.
  • Actions:
  • Durable code/config fixes.
  • Add focused regression tests (unit + integration/e2e).
  • Exit criteria:
  • Repro cases fail before fix and pass after fix.
  • No critical path regressions in staging/canary.

Phase 2: Systemic Hardening (1-2 months)

  • Target: recurring root-cause patterns and lower-severity backlog items.
  • Actions:
  • Refactors, architecture guardrails, coding standards updates.
  • CI quality gates and observability maturity upgrades.
  • Exit criteria:
  • Measurable drop in repeated defect classes.
  • Risk trending and SLO health improve.

Decision Standards

For each issue, decide: - Fix now: high risk and low/medium effort. - Fix next sprint: high/medium risk with dependencies. - Defer with rationale: low risk or low confidence; must include trigger conditions for re-open. - Reject as false positive: document evidence and reviewer sign-off.

Ticket Quality Checklist

Every implementation ticket should include: - Problem statement and impact - Repro steps - Root cause hypothesis - Proposed fix - Acceptance criteria - Tests to add/update - Rollout and rollback plan - Monitoring/alert update requirements

Reporting Cadence

  • Daily (during active remediation):
  • Critical/High status, blockers, newly discovered dependencies
  • Weekly:
  • Issues opened vs closed
  • Risk reduced by severity band
  • Escaped defects and lessons learned

Success Metrics

  • Reduction in open Critical/High issues
  • Mean time to remediate by severity
  • Regression rate after bug fixes
  • % of fixes shipped with new/updated tests
  • % of fixes with monitoring coverage

First 48-Hour Kickoff Checklist

  • Run Opus prompt and capture report
  • Create master tracking table with all findings
  • Reproduce top 5 issues
  • Confirm severity/priorities with engineering + product
  • Create Phase 0 tickets with owners and ETAs
  • Define validation plan and rollback criteria