Defect Severity and Priority

I’ll come straight to the point. Defect or Bug Severity talks about the impact of the defect on the business. The feature getting impacted and its importance to the overall business. For example, a bank software running daily batch files to sort out number of bank transactions. If the batch process doesn’t run then it’s a very Critical/Show Stopper defect. The various severity levels are – Show Stopper/Critical, High, Med, Low.

Severity Category	Description
Critical/Severity 1	Critical/Showstopper error. The test activities cannot commence for the system.
High/Severity 2	Major functionality impacted but testing can continue for other functionalities/features.
Medium/Severity 3	Minor functionality errors / failures but workarounds are available.
Low/Severity 4	Minor/Cosmetic issues that do not impact the functionality of the system or module.

Defect or Bug Priority communicates to the Project team about the urgency to fix the defect. It’s mainly for the development team to identify issues to fix on priority. The above mentioned Batch functionality defect would be a High Priority defect because of its nature and needs to be fixed immediately.

High Severity and Low Priority example – An yearly report functionality not working is of High Severity but the fix can be delayed as once in an year so Low Priority.

Low Severity and High Priority example – A misspelled company name on the Website is a Low Severity but needs to be fixed immediately considering company’s reputation, so it’s a High Priority.

Low Severity and Low Priority example – The color of a button changes after selecting it. It’s not impacting the button functionality, neither the fix is urgent.

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Defect Severity and Priority