SEVERITY & PRIORITY

This is one of the most common terms in software testing.

What is Severity?

Severity is the impact of bug on application. How the bug is going to affect the application. Severity levels are set by the testers.

What is priority?

Priority is the impact of bug on business.

When a tester reports a bug in an application using a bug tracking tools, the severity and priority levels have to be set.

There are 4 levels.

1) Low Severity Low Priority: Consider a login page. You enter a wrong user name. There is an error message displayed stating that the user name entered is incorrect. The spelling of username is spelled as usirname. This is a case of low severity and low priority. The impact of bug on the application as well as business is low.

2) Low Severity High Priority: Consider the website-Yahoo. When you enter the url:www.yahoo.com. The heading Yahoo on the front page of the website is spelled as Yhaoo. This is a case of low severity and High priority. The impact of bug on the application is too low. However the impact of bug on the business is high. The customers may feel that the website is not of Yahoo.

3) High Severity Low Priority: Let us take the example of a website. A user logs into the website. The user clicks on help section. As soon as the user clicks on next page in the help section, an error message is displayed. This is a perfect example of High Severity and Low Priority. The impact of the bug on the application is high however this does not affect the business.

4) High Severity High Priority: Let us take the example of an online shopping site. The user logs in, adds the item to the cart. Enters the check out page and clicks on submit. Suddenly an error message is displayed. This is a case of High Severity as well as High Priority. This is a critical bug and needs to be fixed as soon as possible. This would affect the application as well as the business.

*Testing is never an activity but a challenge*