Severity vs Priority

Severity

·         Severity refers to the Bug and how it affects the User’s interaction with the Application.

·         This is assigned by the Test Engineer

·         Severity is usually a static.

Types of Severity:

·         Critical-> (System Crash)

·         Major-> Impacts the main feature of the product

·         Medium-> Impact some feature of the product

·         Minor-> Minor mistake like spelling mistake

High Severity & Low Priority:  Suppose there is an application which generates some banking related reports weekly, monthly, quarterly & yearly by doing some calculations. In this application, there is a fault while calculating yearly report. This is a high severity fault but low priority because this fault can be fixed in the next release as a change request.

Priority

1.      Priority refers with respect to the project and how urgent it is to solve the Bug in the context of the work been done.

2.      Priority should be dynamic, to be revised and updated as the project progresses.

3.      The Priority of a bug should be set and modified in agreement by the project stakeholders based on the strategic and tactical decisions of the project. In most cases, this is done during a regular (daily, weekly, etc) meeting where they review and evaluate the open bugs in the system.

Types of Priority:

·         High

·         Medium

·         Low

High Priority & High Severity: A show stopper error which occurs on the basic functionality of the application(Eg. A site maintaining the student details, on saving record if it, doesn't allow to save the record then this is high priority and high severity bug)

High priority and Low Severity

·         Example 1

Suppose in a banking application there is one module ATM Facility. In that ATM facility when ever we are depositing/withdrawing money it is not showing any conformation message but actually at the back end it is happening properly with out any mistake, hence it is missing of an error message. In this case as it is happening properly so there is nothing wrong with the application but as end user is not getting any conformation message so he/she will be confused. So we can consider this issue as HIGH Priority but LOW Severity defects

·         Example 2:

The spell mistakes that happens on the cover page or heading or title of an application. 

 

Low Priority and Low Severity:

·         Any cosmetic or spell issues which is in a paragraph or in the report (Not on cover page, heading, title)