Priority and Severity ~ Testing

Priority:

This priority status is set by the tester to the developer mentioning the time frame to fix the defect.
If high priority is mentioned then the developer has to fix it at the earliest.
The priority status is set based on the customer requirements.

Example: If the company name is misspelled in the home page of the website, then the priority is high and severity is low to fix it.

Priority can be of following types:

Low: The defect is an irritant which should be repaired, but repair can be deferred until after more serious defect have been fixed.
Medium: The defect should be resolved in the normal course of development activities. It can wait until a new build or version is created.
High: The defect must be resolved as soon as possible because the defect is affecting the application or the product severely. The system cannot be used until the repair has been done.

Severity:

The Severity status is used to explain how badly the deviation is affecting the build.
The Severity type is defined by the tester based on the written test cases and functionality.

Example: If an application or web page crashes when a remote link is clicked, in this case clicking the remote link by an user is rare but the impact of application crashing is severe. So the severity is high but priority is low.

Severity can be of following types:

Critical: The defect that results in the termination of the complete system or one or more component of the system and causes extensive corruption of the data. The failed function is unusable and there is no acceptable alternative method to achieve the required results then the severity will be stated as critical.
Major: The defect that results in the termination of the complete system or one or more component of the system and causes extensive corruption of the data. The failed function is unusable but there exists an acceptable alternative method to achieve the required results then the severity will be stated as major.
Moderate: The defect that does not result in the termination, but causes the system to produce incorrect, incomplete or inconsistent results then the severity will be stated as moderate.
Minor: The defect that does not result in the termination and does not damage the usability of the system and the desired results can be easily obtained by working around the defects then the severity is stated as minor.
Cosmetic: The defect that is related to the enhancement of the system where the changes are related to the look and field of the application then the severity is stated as cosmetic.

scenarios related to the severity and priority

High Priority & High Severity: An error which occurs on the basic functionality of the application and will not allow the user to use the system.

Upon login to system “Run time error” displayed on the page, so due to which tester is not able to proceed the testing further.
Application crashed while opening
Website home page failed to load.
A site maintaining the student details, on saving record if it, doesn’t allow to save the record then this is high priority and high severity bug

High Priority & Low Severity:

The spelling mistakes that happens on the cover page or heading or title of an application.

High Severity & Low Priority: An error which occurs on the functionality of the application (for which there is no workaround) and will not allow the user to use the system but on click of link which is rarely used by the end user.

Crashed in application if end user do some weird steps which are not usual or invalid steps.
The download Quarterly statement is not generating correctly from the website & user is already entered in quarter in last month. So we can say such bugs as High Severity, this is bugs occurring while generating quarterly report. We have time to fix the bug as report is generated at the end of the quarter so priority to fix the bug is Low.
System is crashing in the one of the corner scenario, it is impacting major functionality of system so the Severity of the defect is high but as it is corner scenario so many of the user not seeing this page we can mark it as Low Priority by project manager since many other important bugs are likely to fix before doing high priority bugs because high priority bugs are can be visible to client or end user first.

Low Priority & Low Severity:

Any cosmetic or spelling issues which is within a paragraph or in the report (Not on cover page, heading, title).

Difference between Severity and Priority:

Severity should be defined by QA whereas Priority should be Defined by Dev Delivery manager
Severity driven by functionality whereas priority driven by the business value.
Severity describe the how the defect is impacting the functionality of the product or software under test and Priority indicates the importance of the defect and when it should gets addressed or fixed.

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