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Online service systems have become increasingly popular. During operation of an online service system, incidents (unplanned interruptions or outages of the service) are inevitable. As an initial step of incident management, it is important to be able to automatically assign an incident report to a suitable team. We call this step incident triage, which can significantly affect the efficiency and accuracy of overall incident management. To better understand the incident-triage practice in industry, we perform an empirical study of incident triage on 20 large-scale online service systems in Microsoft. We find that incorrect assignment of incident reports occurs frequently and incurs unnecessary cost, especially for the incidents with high severity. For example, about 4.11% to 91.58% of incident reports are reassigned at least once and the average increment in incident-triage time caused by the reassignments is up to 10.16X …