What is the difference between Severity and Priority ? Which one is used by a tester ?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Siddiq on November 11, 2009 at 11:03pm

Hi Mahesh,

Severity is how badly the defect is impacting the AUT - Tester

Priority is how early the defect has to be Fixed - Developer

Ideally Tester has to specify both Severity and Priority. Developer the Severity. BA/Client the priority.

Thanks,
Siddiq

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Kunal Tambe on November 11, 2009 at 11:53pm

Hello,

Severity defines, type of bug like exceptional, functional or GUI.
Whether priority defines, how early that bug should be solved.

Thanx...

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Shreyansh Patil on November 12, 2009 at 9:59am

Severity - describe the bug in terms of functionality OR How much the bug is effected on functionality of the application.

Priority - Describe the bug in terms of customer OR How quickly we need to fix the Bug.


Thanks,
PATIL

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by jalpa suchak on November 12, 2009 at 10:04am

Severity : is referred to how bad bug ...How much this bug is important from technical point of view...

priority : is how urgent the bug shuould be fix...How much this bug is important from business point of view...

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Mohamed Zakir on November 12, 2009 at 11:19am

Agree with Siddiq. Good explanation...

- zakir

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Ajay Pardhi on November 12, 2009 at 11:28am

Severity: Severity is nothing But Impact of the buf In terms of functionality

Priority: How Soon the bug should be fixed (In most of the companies it is decided by Management)


Ex: If OK butoon is wrongly displayed as

KO then

Its Severity is Low

and Priority is High

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Bibek Khatiwara on November 12, 2009 at 5:13pm

Ya Jalpa! you hit the target..

lovely :)

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Jitendra D on November 12, 2009 at 1:19pm

What’s the difference between priority and severity?
# “Priority” is associated with scheduling, and “severity” is associated with standards.
# “Priority” means something is afforded or deserves prior attention; a precedence
established by order of importance (or urgency).
# “Severity” is the state or quality of being severe; severe implies adherence to rigorous
standards or high principles and often suggests harshness; severe is marked by or
requires strict adherence to rigorous standards or high principles, e.g. a severe code of
behavior. # The words priority and severity do come up in bug tracking. A variety of
commercial, problem tracking management software tools are available. These tools,
with the detailed input of software test engineers, give the team complete information
so developers can understand the bug, get an idea of its ’severity’, reproduce it and fix
it.
# The fixes are based on project ‘priorities’ and ’severity’ of bugs. The ’severity’ of a
problem is defined in accordance to the customer’s risk assessment and recorded in
their selected tracking tool.

Severity Levels can be defined as follow:
S1 - Urgent/Showstopper. Like system crash or error message forcing to close the window.
Tester's ability to operate the system either totally (System Down), or
almost totally, affected. A major area of the users system is affected by the incident and it is significant to
business processes.
S2 - Medium/Workaround. Exist like when a problem is required in the specs but tester can go on with testing.
Incident affects an area of functionality but there is a work-around which negates impact to business process.
This is a problem that:
a) Affects a more isolated piece of functionality.
b) Occurs only at certain boundary conditions.
c) Has a workaround (where "don't do that" might be an acceptable answer to the user).
d) Occurs only at one or two customers. or is intermittent
S3 - Low. This is for minor problems, such as failures at extreme boundary conditions that are unlikely to occur in
normal use, or minor errors in layout/formatting. Problems do not impact use of the product in any substantive
way. These are incidents that are cosmetic in nature and of no or very low impact to business processes.

Priority Levels can be defined as follow:
Bug Priority Level - Meaning
P0 - Show Stopper,No further testing work can be done
P1 - Must fix, No work around,critical functionality not working
P2 - Need to be fixed
P3 - Fix when possible
P4 - Fix in next version

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Mahesh Dhule on November 12, 2009 at 1:49pm

Thanks Jitendra .

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Hitesh Shah on February 28, 2014 at 3:31pm

Thanks for nice explain, Can you share High Severity -High priority, High Severity-Low Severity,  High priority-low severity and low priority-Low Severity example? (Example should be any one live project or based on your experience )

Thanks

--Hitesh

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Bhumika on November 12, 2009 at 1:30pm

Severity - how severely the defect affects the application
Priority - how early the defect should be resolved.

Severity is defined by tester

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by chintu on February 24, 2014 at 4:45pm

super ji

• ▶ Reply

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• 2
• Next ›
• Page