Defect prioritization
These are the guidelines we use for setting Priority of bug fixes. It is combination of Severity and Frequency
Severity rankings
High
- Core functionality completely or partially broken
- Is a regression bug of any severity (that means we broke something that used to work)
- Affects universal features that may affect multiple apps – like installer, login, activation and any common/universal code
- Activation, login and connectivity and other universal issues
- Branding related issues e.g. spelling problem or very bad grammar bug on a high profile web page
- Serious performance issues
- Application crashes or other “hard landings”
- Deleterious effects including damaged or lost data, compromised end user security
- Lack of browser support for key pages like home page
- Anything that would be very annoying to a user like showing exception dialog many times, never ending process, memory leak
Medium
- Non-core functionality broken
- Minor performance problems
- Non-branding but UI damaging problems (including 120dpi problems)
- Recoverable exceptions
- Website problem – bad link, redundant text, missing tooltip or any other problem
- Spelling, grammar problem on any non-high profile page e.g. KB
Low
- Help connectivity or F1 problems
- Lower level functionality does not work
- A cosmetic problem, such as an additional space between words in some tooltip, capitalization, punctuation
- Incorrect tab order, missing tooltip, wrong short cut key etc
- Wrongly aligned text or other cosmetic problem
- Needless GUI element (frame, line, bolded text which shouldn’t be or vice versa)
- Violation of UI standards
- Inconsistency with other apps
No fix
For certain bugs of low severity and low frequency, it is better to simply not fix them. The time can be better used to add value to users to fix other bugs, add features etc.
Probability rankings
- Always – e.g. happens in > 75% cases
- Frequently – e.g. happens in > 50% cases
- Sometime – e.g. happens < 50% cases
- Rarely – e.g. happens < 25% cases
Other
Critical – Bugs that have extremely negative and/or destructive consequences to the user (deletes data, crashes local environment, affects functionality of operating system, security issue etc.) are always fixed, not matter the frequency
Patches – Bugs reported by customers, regardless of severity/frequency are given patch status and patched, according to current product support policies and customer subscription level
July 3, 2018
