Severity Vs Priority

In my experience, many novice testers are thinking both severity and priority are reflecting the same meaning. Is it so?. No. Both are completely differ.

While logging defect, SQA needs to fill severity and priority of the logging/recording defect.

Severity:

Severity is simply tells about how harmful/severe the defect is. In other term, we can tell how this defect is impacting the product. Severity is classified into Critical, Major, Minor, Cosmetic, Enhancement.

Critical: if the application crashes (showstopper) or hangs or huge vital information loss, sanity failures - we can say this kind of defect’s severity as Critical.

Major: incase of blocking issues, major functionality/feature flaws. These kinds of defects were generally blocking the tester to execute all testcases of a specific feature.

Minor: Minimal loss of functionality but not harmful, misbehavior of functionality like improper popup message to the user and all…

Cosmetic: Alignment issues, Spell mistakes, usability hurdles and all.

Enhancement: Nothing but new feature addition for the betterment of the software quality. These kinds of defects should be address in Requirements and in next phase of releases.

Priority:

Here Priority talks about how importance and scheduling this defect to fix it, by considering the defects weight age by the tester. In other words, from SQA point of view, requesting/instructing the developer to fix the defects based on the weight age but not based upon Severity. Last line might be little bit confusing rightJ. You will get clear picture while reading examples.

Based upon the defect SQA should set the Priority as P1 (High Priority), P2 (Medium Priority) and P3 (Low Priority) to indicate the developer to “Resolve immediately”, “Give More Attention” and “Normal Queue”.

Examples:

Defect1:

During phone call, mobile restarts automatically due to another incoming call.

This defects severity must be “Critical” and Priority also must be “High/Resolve Immediately” as mobile phone’s main functionality itself getting failure on another incoming calls.

Defect2:

S/w Application is working on all windows platforms (win 7, vista, win2k3, win2k8) expect win2k8 – 64 bit OS.

Severity: Critical

Priority: Low/Normal Queue à depends upon the weight age of customer’s specification on the environment priority gets differ here irrespective of severity state.

Defect3:

Mobile Message Application: In Roaming area, user is not able to send group message from the message application.

Severity: Minor (Major incase of single separate message sending failure and not group message)

Priority: Medium/Give high attention

Defect4:

a. Spell Mistake: Display of the customer name is in correct.

           
Severity: Critical

Priority: High

b. Spell Mistake: Display of label name is displaying as “Nmae” instead of “Name” at home page.

            Severity: Cosmetic

            Priority: High (Resolve immediately as it is displaying on the main page – all users will capture this)

Hope everyone understood the difference of severity and how to define priority as well.