Generally we have to set the Severity and Priority level for a Defect. Severity level will be set by the Testing Team and the Priority level will be set by the Development Team.
Severity means how much severe is the particular defect in the application (i.e.) how it affects the functionality of the application
Priority means the importance and urgency to fix the defect by the developers (i.e.) which defect should be fixed first and which should be fixed in later versions.
There and some levels in severity and priority, they are as follows….
Severity levels:
Trivial
Minor
Major
Critical
Block
Priority Levels:
Low
Medium
High
Urgent
Immediate
The Severity and Priority levels must vary depends upon the company and the defect tracking tool used by the company.
Some Examples for the priority levels….
Low Priority: Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, Textual Errors, Orphan pages, broken links, GUI errors,
High Priority: Wrong Functionality, Applications Crashes, Errors
If you have any feed backs for this post, kindly drop it in the comments section.
Priority should be set by Product Manager who owns the product. Developers might put priority as per their bandwidth and efforts. PM has to take decision on when should market have this fix.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Tushar about the priority in bugs. Only the Product Manager knows which the impact is that the bug causes to the business.So the priority is not a responsability of the development team.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Tushar. Severity is impact to the product/service, priority is relative and is with regards to importance to the company. Specifically, priority could be adjusted for key customers, a sale, political, etc. The software developers are not the right 'decider' for priority.
ReplyDeleteI also agee wih Tushar, the priority should be with the PM so that financial impact is the leading factor.
ReplyDeleteTester should get Priority from Product owner/Manager not developers.
ReplyDeleteFrom my experience the most effective way in using these is to allow:
ReplyDelete- to define Severity by a Test Team (or someone how reports a bug). Usually these people understand the affect of the bug on application, testing process, etc better than others. It is not Testers responsiblity to set Priority.
- to define Priority by Product Owner (not always a Project Manager specifically). Usually this is a person who understand which functionality is more important in release or which area is more important to be correct sooner.
Severity itself should be used by Product/Project owners as a trigger to action. The higher Severity - the quicker reaction should be.
Priority itself should be used by Dev Team to prioritize their work.
Or the priorities and severities could be discussed, agreed and set by the whole team, Test, Dev, Stakeholders.
ReplyDeleteAs stated the priority and severity levels are going to differ from orginisation to orginisation but so will who actually sets them/the 'deciders'.
I am inclined to disagree with some of this. In my opinion, Severity is (long-term) impact on functionality, Priority is (immediate) impact on testing.
ReplyDeleteIf you have a defect which stops testing, it must have top priority.
Conversely, consider the following: a financial system is due to go live at the beginning of the financial year (let's say April). A major but isolated bug is found in a year-end process. It has a high severity, but you aren't going to run it until March/April of the following year, so you have a year + to fix it. You could go live with the bug, and fix it later, so the priority could be deemed to be fairly low.
Therefore, I think the PM should set the severity, and the Test Manager should set the priority. Hopefully the TM will know enough to set both initially (subject to PM review).
As I see it, severity is an attribute that is attached to issues, whereas priority is an attribute that is attached to tasks. Although there is a high degree of correspondence between the two, they're not applied to the same artifacts. Example: a manager files a ticket and creates an issue with moderate severity. A developer or manager subsequently creates a task to deal with said issue, assigning the task a priority of moderate or high. Severity and priority are orthogonal but related. Severity deals with a problem item; priority deals with a to-do item.
ReplyDeleteseverity and priority is not depends upon company it depend upon application complexity
ReplyDeleteIn case of automated testing, testing is performed by a computer using software such as WinRunner, LoadRunner, etc. Java software development companies nowadays have mostly shifted to automated testing.STC Technologies
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