Priority & Severity in Software Testing

Today we will discuss what is the difference between priority and severity in software testing. The software defect can be categorized into different severity and different priorities. Here, a defect signifies any anomaly in software against requirements.

What is the severity and priority in software testing?

In software testing, defects can be categorized in terms of severity and priority. Now questions arise what the severity is? Severity indicates the impact on the software product. High severity means business got affected if not fixed. The higher the severity, the more the system was affected and vice-versa. Now, what is a priority? High Priority indicates software defects should be fixed as soon as possible. In simple terms, the higher the priority, the more urgency is in fixing the defect, and vice-versa.

Severity can be categorized into five types: critical, major, moderate, minor, and cosmetic.

Priority is also categorized into three types: High, medium, and low.

High Severity Low Priority

Now we understand the high severity and low priority defects. In this type of defect, an impact on the system is high, but the probability of occurrence is very low. Here, the developer can take some time to fix the defect. For example, a software product crashes if the user clicks one internal page.

Low Severity Low Priority

Now we understand the low severity and low priority defect. In this type of defect, both the impact on the system and the probability of occurrence are very low. Here, the developer can take his/her own time to fix the defect. For example, if there is a grammatical mistake in the privacy policy page on an e-commerce website. In this case, there is no impact on business, and no harm on reputation as those pages are rarely visited by end-users.

Low Severity High Priority

Now we understand the low severity and high priority defects. In this type of defect, the impact on the system is low, and the probability of occurrence is very high. Here, the developer needs to fix the defect as early as possible. For example, there is the wrong logo on the company home page on an e-commerce website. In this case, there is no impact on business, but this harms the reputation; hence these defects should be fixed in no time.

High Severity High Priority

Now we understand the high severity and high priority defect. In this type of defect, both the impact on the system and the probability of occurrence are very high. Here, the developer needs to fix the defect as early as possible. For example, an application crashes with the click of buying an item on an e-commerce website. In this case, there is a high impact on business, and also this harms the reputation; hence these defects should be fixed in no time.