Priority and Severity

There are so many bug tracking as well as software management tools are available in the market. These tools allow tester to convey complete information about bug to the development team. The Priority and Severity terms are used to elaborate the importance and impact of the bug.

Priority: Basically priority tells how urgent the bug should be fixed. How much this bug is important from business point of view. Priority is related to scheduling to resolve the problem. It’s status set on the basis of customer requirement. Priority can be categorized in following level.       

Urgent (P1):  Must be fixed in the next built because without fix it no further work.

High (P2):      Must be fixed in any of the upcoming built but should be included in the release because critical functionality is not working.

Medium (P3): May be fixed after the release.

Low (P4):      May or may not be fixed at all.

Severity: The severity is assigned by tester. Based on seriousness of the bug severity is assigned to defect. Basically severity tells us impact (in term of functionality) of this bug  to our application. Severity can be categorized in following level-

Urgent/Showstopper (S1): Like system crash or error message forcing to close the window.
Medium/Workaround (S2): Incident affects an area of functionality but there is a work-around which negates impact to business process.
Minor (S3): These are incidents that are cosmetic in nature and of no or very low impact to business processes.

Let us take some example on different situation of assigning priority and severity-

1. High Priority & High Severity: Upon login to system “Run time error” displayed on the page, so due to which tester is not able to proceed the testing further.

2. High Priority and Low Severity: On the home page of the company’s web site spelling mistake in the name of the company is surely a High Priority issue. In terms of functionality it is not breaking anything so we can mark as Low Severity, but making bad impact on the reputation of company site. So it highest priority to fix this.

3. Low Priority and High severity: System is crashing in the one of the corner scenario, it is impacting major functionality of system so the Severity of the defect is high but as it is corner scenario so many of the user not seeing this page we can mark it as Low Priority by project manager since many other important bugs are likely to fix before doing high priority bugs because high priority bugs are can be visible to client or end user first.

4. Low Priority and Low Severity: Spelling mistake in the confirmation error message like “You have registered success” instead of successfully, success is written.