Defect Priority

What is Defect Priority?

Defect Priority signifies how important & urgently it is to fix this defect. In other words Priority means how fast it has to be fixed. The Defect priority status is set by the project manager based on the customer requirements & based on Project Priorities the product fixes are done. Priority is related to scheduling to resolve the problem. It is a pointer towards the importance of the bug & if High priority is mentioned then the developer has to fix it at the earliest. It is related to technical aspect of the product. It reflects on how bad the bug is for the system and also largely related to Business or Marketing aspect.

Defect Priority is classified into the following categories:

• Show stopper:  This needs to be fixed right now, everything else can wait, the build cannot be released with this defect
• Urgent: Needs to be fixed before any other high, medium or low defect should be fixed
• High: Should be fixed as early as possible
• Medium: May be fixed after the release / in the next release.
• Low: Fixing can be deferred until all other priority defects are fixed

It is also represented as P1 for Show stopper, P2 for Urgent Priority, P3 for High Priority, P4 for Medium and P5 for Low Priority.

Defect Priority is quite a subjective decision & don’t directly take decision to make the defect with above categories. Nevertheless, to determine the Defect priority following few points needs to considered:

• Urgency as Business point of view to fix the defect
• Impact of the defect on functionality
• Visibility of the defect
• Check if resources are available or not to fix this means developer to fix this and Testers to verify the fixes.
• Main constraint in Availability of Time to fix the defect

Definition of priority

The level of (business) importance assigned to an item, e.g. defect.

Especially when there is a large of number of defects then management of the defect is taken care based on the Defect Priority of the Defect which helps to minimize the product instability.

For more details on Priority & severity difference, see What is difference between Priority and Severity?

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