How do you prioritize defects?

Defect priority is a critical concept in quality assurance, software development, and other fields where defects or issues need addressing. This concept refers to the relative importance or urgency assigned to a defect or issue based on various criteria, including customer impact, technical complexity, and frequency. With defect priority, teams can more accurately determine the order in which defects should be addressed enabling these teams to adopt a structured approach to managing and resolving problems. The primary goal of defect prioritization is to ensure that when required, limited resources are effectively and efficiently allocated to fix the most important or impactful issues first.

Defect priority levels are categorizations that indicate the relative importance or urgency of defects, typically ranging from critical (highest priority) to deferred (lowest priority), to guide their order of resolution in a project or product development.

How Defect priority and Defect severity differs?

Defect priority determines the urgency of which bugs to fix while defect severity measures the potential impact a bug could have on a product or software’s functionality. Defect severity levels are categorized as minor, moderate, major, and critical severity. Defect priority levels are categorized as deferred, low, medium, high, and critical priority.

Factors Influencing Defect Priority

There are a variety of factors that determine a defect’s priority level. Factors like customer and business impact, technical complexity, frequency or repetition, dependencies, regulatory and compliance, and stakeholder input all affect where a bug is placed on the defect triage list.

• Customer and Business Impact: The priority of a defect is heavily influenced by the severity of its impact on a customer's user experience and the potential financial consequences it could pose to the organization. If a defect only impacts the way a webpage looks, it’s less urgent than fixing a defect that customers will encounter when purchasing a product. 
• Technical Complexity: Defect priority is affected by the technical intricacies and resource-intensive nature of the issue, as more complex defects may require significant time and effort to resolve. When a defect arises that will take a few days to fix, the process of fixing it should begin as early as possible to avoid further disruption. 
• Frequency or Repetition: The recurrence of defects can elevate their priority, especially if they affect a large user base — frequent occurrences that affect many customers may lead to widespread user dissatisfaction.
• Dependencies: Defects can rise in priority when they interrelate with other tasks or teams and act as roadblocks, necessitating their resolution to unblock progress across the entire project.
• Regulatory and Compliance Requirements: A defect’s priority is heightened if they can result in non-compliance with industry regulations or legal requirements, potentially leading to legal and reputational consequences.
• Stakeholder Input: In a software development project, stakeholders can include product managers, customers, business owners, and end-users. If a defect has varying impacts on these different stakeholders, their input is invaluable in determining its priority.