When its time to define and set values for Priority and Severity of a defect, the software tester some times gets a concern when the topic is not under control of he/she doesnt have any previous experience on this. The most frequent mistake is to define only the three common values "High, Medium & Low", but there must be an answer of "why those values?", when I should say this is High, and this Low.
Well, I will stop to talk on "Donts", the best practice for these values depends on the context of the methodology that it has being used, but you at least should try to find 5 values for Priority and 5 values for Severity.
According to the importante of the customer to get fix that bug/defect this must be translated to the Priority, and the impact on get this bug fixed on the code, must be transtaled in the severity.
Here I show you an example for those values:
Severity
- Cosmetic Error
- Partial Loss
- Loss of functionality
- Loss of Major functionality
- Hard crash
Priority
- Easy to fix.
- Workaround for short term.
- Workaround for long term.
- Daily process impact
- Daily process is down.
Then, you can get with these values the weight of the bug, by multiplying the value got on Severity and priority. i.e. if you get Priority = 2 and Severity = 3 the weight of the bug will be 6.
Enjoy it !! and use this information for your records.
