Difference Between Severity Vs Priority In Testing

Difference Between Severity Vs Priority in Testing: Don’t confuse the severity of a defect with its priority for fixing. These two measures apply to different questions. Severity refers to how much it hurts when the defect exists, while priority refers to how important it is that you get around to fixing the defect at all. Priority is a measure of your own interest in fixing the problem, not a measure of the importance of the problem.

What is Severity?

Severity is a measure of how badly, negatively, or pain it affects the customer on a regular basis. Many companies keep track of a product’s defect rates in order to make sure that they are doing right by their customers in terms of the number and severity of bugs found in a release.

A defect rate is simply the number of defects found in a product or release divided by the total number of customers who encounter that release. A low bug count with a high rate indicates problems for users, and therefore needs immediate attention.

What is Priority?

Priority is a measure of how important it is that you get around to fixing the problem at all. Priorities can be assigned by customer importance, which is simply the results of asking customers what they want fixed first (affecting many customers), or criticality, which would be determined by looking at the defect itself and its impact on customer

Difference Between Severity Vs Priority:

Now that you understand what each of them really means, let us understand the difference between priority and severity.

Severity:

• Severity is a measure of how badly, negatively or pain it affects the customer on a regular basis.
• A defect rate is simply the number of defects found in a product or release divided by the total number of customers who encounter that release.
• A low bug count with a high rate indicates problems for users, and therefore needs immediate attention.
• Severity is the way of ranking defects on a scale of 1 (minimum) to 10 (maximum).
• Severity is the result of weeks and months of testing.
• Severity can be identified by severity levels such as Critical, High, Medium, Low, etc.
• Severity helps to prioritize the defects with respect to each other.
• Severity is what the testers concentrate on while testing.

Priority:

• Priority is a measure of how important it is that you get around to fixing the problem at all.
• Priority can be assigned by customer importance, which are simply the results of asking customers what they want fixed first (affecting many customers), or criticality, which would be determined by looking at the defect itself and its impact on customer.
• Priority is not a measure of the pain or damage that will occur if the defect isn’t fixed.
• Priority must be set by the Product Manager, based on customer feedback and other factors.
• Priority is not something that’s measured by weeks or months of testing.
• Priority is the degree of importance to repair a defect.
• Priority helps to determine what defects should be repaired first by testing and development team.
• Priority is what the testers give in terms of test case prioritization and defect identification.

Notes:

Customers are generally more concerned with the priority of fixes than they are with their severity. Severity and Priority have two different definitions, but in practice, it is very difficult to separate them. However, separating them helps them in prioritizing the defect and fixing it accordingly.

It is important to understand that priority doesn’t always mean the defect is easy to fix. All new defects are given a default priority of High until we have more information about them. This allows us to get started on them quickly, but we’re also aware that there may be more information coming or a better way to fix it.

For each new defect report, the severity is also initially judged as High. This gives us a starting point for when we assign our development and testing resources.

Conclusion:

From the above table, we are tried to describe the key differences between Priority and Severity in Details. We hope after reading this article you can easily understand the differences between Priority and Severity.

If you still find any difficulty in understanding the above concepts, ask via comment.