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by pure-awesome 2302 days ago
It sounds like they're using:

- "severity" as level of importance the tester assigned it when they found the bug and - "priority" as level of importance a developer assigned to it after triage.

That first piece of information is important when you need to determine which bugs to look at first for triage, but how important is it after that point? Can it not just be replaced after the developer's judgement?

In other words, could you not have a single priority field? The tester uses a heuristic to assign an initial priority (e.g., crashes are P0, cosmetic are P4). The dev uses this to prioritize which bugs to triage first, and once they've determined a new priority based on customer experience combined with app behaviour, they replace the old one.

If you really need to go back and check what the tester assigned, then I assume you can just use the "history" or "revision" feature in your bug tracking app.

Additionally, as suggested in a different comment, you can add a label for the bug's type if you feel that's important (crashing, lagging, cosmetic, etc.).

Perhaps the message here is that the app's behaviour in a vacuum is not the sole determinant of its priority. But then that should be the message, rather than claiming there is another metric which needs to be separately tracked when evaluating bugs.

4 comments

I think the formula should be - severity * (how widespread is this) - ease of workaround = priority. So if any of those measures change (e.g. an easy workaround is discovered, it's determined that the bio page that is crashing is also almost never viewed) then the priority should be adjusted. Having just severity without a measure of 'how many people does this impact?' and 'just how badly does this impact them?' seems like it's missing part of the picture.
I liked your multiplication !

But I think it should be similar to risk calculation, multiply by the "impact" or "damage". A typo might offend a small number of people but have a big publicity impact

> when you need to determine which bugs to look at first for triage

If you can't at least do a rough triage of all the new bugs in one sitting, you're either not allocating enough time for triage, or letting yourself get way too bogged down with ancillary conversation during the triage meeting, or it's just time to scrap the product and go home.

If you can stay on top of your triage, then there's not really any need to worry about what order you do them in.

Honestly, I've found that testers are poor judges of priority. They get emotionally involved in their bug and don't really make a good judgement of the priority to the business.

That's why the split between priority and severity exists: The tester is telling you the subjective view of the bug as if a user encountered it; and the triage process is all about judging the priority of fixing the bug in this particular release cycle.

Testers are not supposed to judge priority, that's a business decision (that could be based on technical know-how) and as such should be decided by business people aka PMs
Different people need different information. Thus the split, so you can decide how much you should care.