What is the difference between bug priority & bug severity? With Example?

Question

What is the difference between bug priority & bug severity? With Example

Answer 1

Bug priority - how quickly/when it is to be fixed.

Example - student needs other people to do his/her homework because they aren't up to doing the study themselves. Homework must be done before it is due. Ask a question in Y!A and hope that the people answering give me the right answer.



Bug severity - the depth of problem the bug causes or reveals.

Example - student is not able to do own homework. Is therefore studying the wrong course and needs to admit this before they have just scrambled through to an even higher and more difficult level of study when the failure to do own homework will start to result in failures.



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Answer 2

Severity and Priority is the term we the use for Bug Sensitivity

Severity means: How severe the bug is or How Bad the Bug is?

Severity is from Testers End.

Priority means Priority to make them(bug) fix.

Priority of bug is decided by the Developer…

Answer 3

Bug severity levels are based on criticality. ie - how much damage will this bug cause. Usually minor, major or critical. Bug priority is the order in which they need to be fixed. For example, you may have a minor bug which will affect a large number of systems or an important client which might make it a high priority. While a critical bug which may only affect a small sample or small clients may be given a lower priority. I hope this made sense.

Answer 4

Priority is Business;

Severity is Technical



In Triages, team will give the Priority of the fix based on the business perspective. They will check “How important is it to the business that we fix the bug?” In most of the times high Severity bug is becomes high Priority bug, but it is not always. There are some cases where high Severity bugs will be low Priority and low Severity bugs will be high Priority.





In most of the projects,if schedule drawn closer to the release, even if the bug severity is more based on technical perspective, the Priority is given as low because the functionality mentioned in the bug is not critical to business.







Priority and Severity gives the excellent metrics to identify overall health of the Project. Severity is customer-focused while priority is business-focused. Assigning Severity for a bug is straightforward. Using some general guidelines about the project, testers will assign Severity but while assigning a priority is much more juggling act. Severity of the bug is one of the factors for assigning priority for a bug. Other considerations are might be how much time left for schedule, possibly ‘who is available for fix’, how important is it to the business to fix the bug, what is the impact of the bug, what are the probability of occurrence and degree of side effects are to be considered.







Read the excellent article Arguing Apples and Oranges

This article clearly explains the how Priority and Severity of the bug given.



Some of the above points taken from this article



Many organizations mandate that bugs of certain severity should be at least certain priority. Example: Crashes must be P1; Data loss must be P1, etc. A severe bug that crashes the system only once and not always reproducible will not be P1, where as an error condition that results re-entry a portion of input for every user will be P1







Microsoft uses a four-point scale to describe severity of bugs and three-point scale for Priority of the bug. They are as follows





Severity



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1. Bug causes system crash or data loss.



2. Bug causes major functionality or other severe problems; product crashes in obscure cases.



3. Bug causes minor functionality problems, may affect "fit anf finish".



4. Bug contains typos, unclear wording or error messages in low visibility fields.







Priority



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1. Must fix as soon as possible. Bug is blocking further progress in this area.



2. Should fix soon, before product release.



3. Fix if time; somewhat trivial. May be postponed.