Hi %username%,
This story has started a couple of months ago when I was asked by a friend of mine to help define whether it would be a good idea to implement both Severity and Priority Defect statements as part of their Defect Management Plan (that already listed ~1200+ bugs aggregated by a number of teams on the project for a long period of time). I started digging more into what they had up till that time in terms of QA Processes / Metrics/ Defect Lifecycle, etc that could give me an indication of what they already had and where they would like to land at the end with such a huge number of unresolved issues.
The more we discussed this the more I was shocked how each team (read DEV, QA, PM, etc) would struggle to differentiate the terms, their purpose and people involved. I felt that a simple matrix might help them clear what could be used in order to start moving the sorting progress forward.
So, let’s nail it down to what Defect Severity and Priority are, difference between the two and whether you should use them both or might go ahead with only one combined option.
Xnovo 