Is it possible to have a defect with high severity and low priority and vice-versa i.e high priority and low severity?Justify,if possible?

Questions by raghuramsuravarapu   answers by raghuramsuravarapu

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Priority and Severity are totally different concepts. So it can be possible to have a defect with high priority and low severity and vice versa. Consider a case when a crash occures due to infinite inputs . This is a rare case which the customer will do always. So although it is a crash it can be of low priority.

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BISWAJIT PANI

  • Jun 14th, 2006
 

Yes it is possible

a defect with high severity and low priority

and

with Low severity and high Priority.........

as Severity and Priority both are different concepts......

Regards

Biswajit Pani ( 09986183456 )

panibiswajit@yahoo.com

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Aravind Reddy

  • Jun 15th, 2006
 

 

Hello friends,

ya, its possible for this i will give a example with scenario.

when the developmenpment team prepared the modules and they sent it for testing and after doing some part of testing then a bug raised in the first module its seviority is minor and at the same time in second module a bug raised and its seviority is major. we came to know  the by the next day the client is comming  for inspection and he wanted to get the first module prepared. so at this time less seviority bug gets high priority and high seviority bug gets less priority.

i think u can understand wht i want to say.

if any thing wrong in this pls inform me.

regards

aravind

Hello,

Your scenario is valid when there is a client and a company(where the product is developed and released to the client).In a scenario like ,client and company both are same,i mean if a company wants to develop a product and wants to use for their own use,than how can we set the priority low and severity high or vice versa ?(There are some big organizations in the market where they are having inbuilt software unit to develop their own products).

--Raghu

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dinesh.maddisetty

  • Jun 16th, 2006
 

       Bascically ther are two types of defects ...1)low severity defect and 2)high  priority defect.....

 high severity defect is usally said to be occured when the defct occurs to the basic priority objects,where as low severity defect is usalyy said ,when the defect is said to be the supportive to the basic priority...... 

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I have a formula for priority,i.e Priority=Severity (Vs) Ratings

Rating is the rate of occurence--Usually occures,Sometimes occurs,Never Occur

Severity is the seriousness or impact of that defect over the functionality----Critical,High,Medium,Low

Priority refers to the order (High,Medium,Low) ,in which defects need to be fixed by developer.

Example :

Priority=Critical (Vs) Usually occures = High

   ""    =Medium Vs) Sometimes = Medium

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Selvamohan Chinnasamy

  • Jun 22nd, 2006
 

This is absolutely a controversial statement my dear friend. I was amazed how could you compare Severity and priority into requirements or specification? If I am wrong can you please tell me in detail how you are relating this scenario. selvamohan@gmail.com (+919886732478)

Priority and Severity are two different entities, but when it comes in correlating for setting the status of a bug, they both come together into picture. For instance let us take a scenario that you are testing a web page with login form with username and password field. You observe that when you type password its like ordinary text field displaying characters not in * format. Won't you rise that defect as "High Priority and High Severity". Yes i do agree that you also can have scenarios like making a High Severity and Low priority bug, but not all the time since both the entities are related mostly. Do keep this in mind when you are posting any defect.

Regards,

Selvamohan Chinnasamy (+919886732478) mohi_v@yahoo.co.in for Yahoo IM cselvamohan for Skype 

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Raghu

  • Jun 24th, 2006
 

Hi,

There are lot of comments for this question. In one of your comments you said that, there is a controversial statement. But i am not able to understand to which comment are you pointing in the list of comments?

--Raghu

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mahesh

  • Jun 28th, 2006
 

Let us take an example .

Take a  project like some thing rediff(name of application).We all know the main window name must be the project name and we can see on title bar.

If there is spelling mistake in name say redif then this comes under high priority and low severity because application name must be right.

For calculations, we can say high priority and high severity. 

Neha Jain

  • Jul 4th, 2006
 

Yes it is possible,as bug severity and bug priority are two different things. 

Severity means effect of failure on system ie loss of data, hardware damage or safty issue

where as

Priority means effect of failure on user,client or customer ie loss of value.

Matt Cave

  • Jul 5th, 2006
 

We recently had an issue that was high priority but low severity.We had a problem with an application that occurred very rarely and for which there was a good workaround. However the issue was identified by a large organisation who was trialling our software. We needed to resolve the defect to give them confidence in the system so they would sign up to use our service before the end of the financial quarter. Hence the severity of the defect was very low, but it was necessary to prioritise the defect as high in order to win the deal.

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Mahesh

  • Sep 11th, 2006
 

For Low priority and High Severity: Doesn't allow customer accepted load.

For High Priority and Low Severity:The name of Application is misspelt

For High Priority and High Severity:Hardware Problems,Calculations

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cdodwad

  • Oct 11th, 2006
 

Take an example

You are required to generate a report by clicking on the button ( " Generate Report " ) something similar to it. You may get a wrong alert saying report not generated whereas in actual the report is generating.

This can be a situation of Low Severity and High Priority.

Low seveity because it is not impacting your work. High Priority because the message is causing confusion and it needs to be fixed...

I hope my hypothetical situation was bit clear to understand.

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Chirag Gandhi

  • Oct 11th, 2006
 

Severity means What's the impact of defect on over all business, how serve the defect is!

Priority means which defect is have more urgency to resolve. Which is prior among all other defect.

e.g

1> Low Severity and High Priority : On company's website, company's name is misspell. This is Low Severity but it should be high priority.

2> High Severity and Low Priority : As per business requirement only 100 users can access an application but when it is tested with 101 users it is crashed. So it is impact on business in future ..if more than 100 users can access application. It's a future enhancement. So priority is less but Severity is high.

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chiragmgandhi

  • Oct 11th, 2006
 

Severity means What's the impact of defect on over all business, how serve the defect is!

Priority means which defect is have more urgency to resolve. Which is prior among all other defect.

e.g

1> Low Severity and High Priority : On company's website, company's name is misspell. This is Low Severity but it should be high priority.

2> High Severity and Low Priority : As per business requirement only 100 users can access an application but when it is tested with 101 users it is crashed. So it is impact on business in future ..if more than 100 users can access application. It's a future enhancement. So priority is less but Severity is high.

reddy prasad

  • Aug 12th, 2011
 

yep

scenario : for a banking application "unable to see bank logo in all screens"

severity : low

suppose let us think customer visit is today then

priority : High

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sonica

  • Sep 26th, 2011
 

A Spelling mistake in company logo name is an example of a bug of high priority and low severity

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mithr17

  • Oct 20th, 2011
 

To answer you question in simple terms:

YES it is possible to have a bug with high severity and low priority and vice-verse.

Priority is from the view-point business, and severity is from the technical (developers and QAs) view-point.
Priority: How important is it from the business point of view to fix the bug.
States: High, medium, low

Severity: How bad or worse if the bug and therefore does it need immediate attention.
States: Critical, major, minor
Severity and priority are relative to existing bugs. Assignment of priority and severity again depends on the business and IT's guidelines.

Examples:
High priority and low severity bug -
Suppose you are testing Adobe PDF tool. Everything work except for the print button. Clicking on the print button does not print the PDF file. This will be a low severity and high priority bug.

From the technical viewpoint a user is able to create PDF files in the said tool, which is the biggest feature. But printing for BA or the users is also an important feature. If you as a user are unable to print the file, wouldn't it limit some of your subsequent tasks?

- Suppose you were testing a payroll site. The 'Salary' field is supposed to accept only 2 number after the decimal point. But you noticed the Salary field just rounds the Salary to next integer and appends dot zero zero at the end ($67098.00 instead of $67097.98). So the database receives increased salary figures and there by the company ends up paying more money each month than expected. The severity is low as the salary field still accepts and the integrations work except the company ends up paying more each month. For the business, its bad because their profit margins are affected.

Low priority and high severity bug -
Lets say the date field in the site is coded to dates in the form of "DD-MM-YY" where as the DB accepts date in the form of "YY-MM-DD."
To the business or the user there will not be any inconvenience as the date is still being accepted. But the database integration will be messed up which is a red flag for the technical team - devs & QA.




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rohit9625

  • Oct 21st, 2011
 

Yes definitely if the bug is of high severity it needs to be fixed even if has low priority if the end user will find it will cost huge for company and can also effect on company status

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Deepak

  • Jul 30th, 2012
 

Priority means urgency to fix defect (As business affected)
Severity means Impact of defect in other functionality (Functional impact)

Lets see an example:
If there is spell mistake in name of any web application (lets say gmail application logo has spelling like Gmail) then this defect will be high priority and low severity as this will impact business and people are not gonna use the application as it looks like fraud apps. severity is low because this defect is not impacting any functionality.

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