Sorting and prioritizing bugs

Errors are inevitable. Even the best quality assurance (QA) experts cannot guarantee its absence in the products they bring to market, although they can do a thorough review of the systems, performance, functionality and other aspects of a software they are testing. .

Of course, it's critical to catch as many bugs as possible before releasing a product. And an important and ongoing step in this process is classifying and prioritizing these defects.

Why do you need to classify and prioritize bugs?

There are a number of reasons why this step is critical in the SDLC. Perhaps most important is ensuring that the team focuses on and resolves the most important bugs first – those that are most likely to negatively impact the user's experience with the product. If you don't take this important step – or rather, a series of steps – you could waste time devoting too much attention to smaller issues.

Building a system for this purpose also allows you to improve the organization and make the development and quality control processes smoother. Organization is key in creating robust software because there are many moving parts.

Furthermore, such a system will guide your team’s efforts. They will better understand where to direct their efforts, allowing them to better resolve important defects before they wreak havoc on the product and implement new features.

How to sort and prioritize by bug priority and severity

There are 2 established ways of classifying and prioritizing bugs: priority classification and severity classification.

1. Sorting by priority

Most development companies use a rating system to classify bugs into these categories, using a numeric scale of 1 to 5 or identifying the issue as very high priority, high priority, medium priority, low priority, or very low priority. Priority refers to the order in which a bug should be resolved. In other words, how many bugs – if any – should be fixed before this one? Generally speaking, the ratings correlate as follows:

• CRM Platforms: The bug requires urgent attention or no one will be able to use the specific product or feature successfully.
• High priority: The bug is interfering with the product for the majority of your customer base. The bug requires attention as soon as you resolve high priority bugs.
• Medium priority: The bug may interfere with some users' experience with your product. This can wait, although you should resolve the issue sooner rather than later.
• Low priority: Although the bug is apparent, it is unlikely to affect the vast majority of users and how they interact with your product. You can probably leave this for now and focus on higher priority bugs.
• Very low priority: The bug is barely noticeable and will have little impact on most users' experience with the product. You will likely have trouble reproducing this bug and may leave it to be resolved later.

Most development companies use a rating system to classify bugs into these categories, using a numeric scale of 1 to 5 or identifying the issue as very high priority, high priority, medium priority, low priority, or very low priority. Priority refers to the order in which a bug should be resolved. In other words, how many bugs – if any – should be fixed before this one? Generally speaking, the ratings correlate as follows:

2. Classification by severity

The severity of a bug refers to the scope of the problem and the extent to which the defect will affect the system as a whole. Just like priority, problems are classified as follows:

• Very high severity: The product becomes useless without the intervention of software developers.
• High severity: The product frequently encounters issues that affect aspects such as functionality, performance, or usability.
• Medium Severity: Although the bug does not seriously affect the program as a whole, it does have some impact on the product.
• Low Severity: The bug has almost no negative impact on key product features.
• Very low severity: The product or any of its key features are not affected by the bug.

How to create a bug priority and severity matrix

To determine which bugs to resolve first, you need to perform a thorough analysis of what you found and categorize each of the events into a useful and actionable matrix. The Bug Priority and Severity Matrix takes into account the priority and severity of recorded bugs and helps you visualize all events in quadrants, classified by the intensity of their impact on your project.

This way, when analyzing the bugs and imputing them in the matrix you will have four main sections, showing these events as High Priority and High Severity, High Priority and Low Severity, Low Priority and High Severity, and Low Priority and Low Severity. .

Who determines bug priority?

Bug analysis is a complex and detailed process that must be conducted by experienced experts who can determine which issues will have the most serious impact on the project's ability to be completed on time and within budget. The actual determination of bug priority should be made by the senior specialist overseeing the project, such as a project manager or product owner. This, however, must be done with the customer's participation, so that everything is aligned and all details are clear to everyone involved.

How do Agile and SCRUM handle production bugs?

Agile and SCRUM are some of the most popular and effective methodologies for project management. They each have their own methods for dealing with bugs, with clearly defined steps and results.

Agile

Agile begins by classifying bugs into low, medium, or high priority to determine when the issue will be resolved. If a workaround is available and fixing it immediately has a greater impact, it will be determined that the bug will be resolved later. However, if there is a bug in the core functionality of the product, the fix must be implemented immediately. To do this, the Agile team determines a fixed number of hours that will be dedicated to solving the problem and working to resolve it.

SCRUM

In the case of scrum, the priority of the bug is set by the product owner, who also determines whether this is an issue that needs to be resolved now or one that can wait until the end of the sprint. If they decide to wait, the bug goes to the backlog, to be resolved later. When the time comes to address the issue, the product owner asks the team for a volunteer to resolve it, who then proceeds to fix it while the rest of the team continues working to advance the project.

Things to keep in mind

Determine how each defect relates to the customer experience

Often, severity and priority go hand in hand – both affect the overall quality of the product. But sometimes you may have conflicting issues at play. For example, a bug could be high severity and low priority, meaning it would result in a system that is useless for only a small subset of users. On the other hand, a defect can be low severity and high priority, meaning that the issue itself is not interfering with the overall functionality or usability of the system, although it is impacting the vast majority of your customer base. So how do you decide between these 2 metrics? Ultimately, it often comes down to user experience. In other words, think about how the bug is affecting your target audience. This will help you gauge the amount of attention you need to devote to it and the precedence it should take.

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