Priority and Severity in Testing

Severity can be defined as the impact of defect or a bug on the business processes while Priority of a defect specifies the level of urgency a defect/bug needs to be resolved.

Different Levels of Severity that can be assigned to a defect are :

Blocker: Prevents developers or testers from performing their jobs. Impacts the development process.
Critical: Crash, loss of data, corruption of data, severe memory leak.
Major: Major loss of function, as specified in the product requirements for this release, or existing in the current
Normal: Non-major loss of function.
Minor: Issue that can be viewed as trivial (e.g. cosmetic, UI, easily documented).
Enhancement: Request for software enhancement, or any non-defect task or work item.

Different Levels of Priority that can be assigned to a defect are :

Critical: Defects that prevents further testing of the product or function under test can be classified as Critical Bug. This type of defects have no workaround
High:  A defect that does not function as expected/designed or cause other functionality to fail to meet requirements.
Medium: Defects would like to be fix, but won’t hold shipment for them. Workaround can be provided for such defects
Low: Defects are not as strong as desirable.

Most of the time a Critical Defect is almost a blocker and will be assigned a Blocker Severity and must be fixed urgently.

Below are examples of defects and Priorities that can be assigned to them

Critical:  System crashes when login button is clicked with correct username and password

High: Incorrect calculation of Total Amount or some features in requirements not implemented

Medium: Error Notification was displayed after successful login to the application

Low: Login Button was displayed as Login BTN.

Thanks for reading. Kindly comment  below for any questions…..