Priority & Severity in testing

Severity:
Severity determines the defect's effect on the application.
Severity is given by Testers

Priority: 
Determines the defect urgency of repair.
Priority is given by Test lead or project manager1.

How we define these things

Severity -

Severity levels:
Critical: the software will not run
High: unexpected fatal errors (includes crashes and data corruption)
Medium: a feature is malfunctioning
Low: a cosmetic issue.

Priority -

Priority levels:
P1: fix before next build to test
P2: fix before final release
P3: we probably won’t get to these, but we want to track them anyway to resolve the priority-severity divide.

High Severity & Low Priority : For example an application which generates some banking related reports weekly, monthly, quarterly & yearly by doing some calculations. If 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.

High Severity & High Priority : In the above example if there is a fault while calculating weekly report. This is a high severity and high priority fault because this fault will block the functionality of the application immediately within a week. It should be fixed urgently.

Low Severity & High Priority : If there is a spelling mistake or content issue on the homepage of a website which has daily hits of lakhs. In this case, though this fault is not affecting the website or other functionalities but considering the status and popularity of the website in the competitive market it is a high priority fault.

Low Severity & Low Priority : If there is a spelling mistake on the pages which has very less hits throughout the month on any website. This fault can be considered as low severity and low priority.Priority is used to organize the work. The field only takes meaning when owner of the bugP1 Fix in next buildP2 Fix as soon as possibleP3 Fix before next releaseP4 Fix it time allowP5 Unlikely to be fixed Default priority for new defects is set at P3 It depends entirely on the size of the company.

Severity tells us how bad the defect is.

Priority tells us how soon it is desired to fix the problem.

In some companies, the defect reporter sets the severity and the triage team or product management sets the priority. In a small company, or project (or product), particularly where there aren't many defects to track, you can expect you don't really need both since a high severity defect is also a high priority defect. But in a large company, and particularly where there are many defects, using both is a form of risk management

No comments:

Post a Comment