Many organizations face a hard time satisfying their end-users because the software products and apps they develop are not up to the mark and are unable to meet the expectations of their customers. But organizations of today are unable to track the reasons why their software products get failed even after a day of its release. Organizations often forget to track the defects that they left untreated even after conducting software testing. The reason for still having defects in the system can maybe because of not implementing the use of an appropriate defect tracking tools or may have another reason. But this is something that can not be neglected at any cost.
Defect Severity and Defect Priority
When it comes to the pure and literal meaning of priority in the English language, the word priority means to give something more important than anything else. Severity, on the other hand, means the intensity or seriousness of doing something. In the context of software defects, defect priority means to maintain a list of defects from the top-notch priority level to the bottom. And defect severity means which defects or errors are more intense and need the utmost attention.
Priority vs Severity
Priority is confined to the “Scheduling” while severity is concerned with the “standards of treatment”. With the order of importance for fixtures, organizations come up with a list of defects that we usually call before resolving defects/errors. While on the other hand "Severity" is the state or quality of seriousness; serious here means to follow the strict standards or strict principles, and often means harsh; severe means or requires strict compliance with strict standards or high principles, for example, strict codes of conduct. The words priority and severity do appear in error tracking.
That is why the market is chock-full of multiple software testing tools and defect management tools to cater to the needs of identifying, recording, reporting, and fixing the defects on behalf of the testing teams. These tools, coupled with the detailed input of the software test engineer, can provide the team with complete information so that the developer can understand the error, understand its "severity", reproduce it and fix it.
Priority and Severity of defects can be classified further as;
Low, medium, high, and critical software defects in terms of priority
Low, Minor, Major, and Critical software defects in terms of severity
Priority mapping and severity of defects must be appropriately assigned to each of the software defects. Lack of proper priority mapping and severity level assigned can result in failures of the software product. By now, we hope that you had enough clarification on defect classification both at severity/priority buckets.
