Previously I talked about wanting to separate priority and severity in Roundup and proposed some severity levels:
At the time I left open how to handle features and what priority levels could be.
I just did a Google search on 'priority severity'. My previous blog entry was actually the first hit. The second hit was a page on the original c2 wiki espousing the principle DifferentiatePriorityAndSeverity.
Some commentators suggested a distinction was a nice idea in theory but too hard for submitters in practice. What I am suggesting, though, is that the submitter need only worry about severity, the developer fixing the bug about priority and only the people responsible for triage really need to worry about the relationship between the two.
One commentator mentioned Microsoft's severity levels as being:
This seems reasonable, although the second and third might get blurry unless it's clear what the granularity of a "feature" is (which is probably spelt out in specs at Microsoft). It also doesn't take into account whether a workaround exists which I think is important.
I do like the calling out of a crash or loss of data. And I did have a slight problem with my own earlier list in distinguishing "major" and "minor" which the Microsoft list doesn't worry about.
With regard to features, I think it is helpful to distinguish new features from enhancements to existing features. This may suffer from some of the same granularity problem mentioned earlier for the Microsoft severity levels but I think it makes sense in the context of a particular project's plan.
As I mentioned in my previous entry, I think there's also a need to handle code cleanup, refactoring and other internal enhancements. I previously suggested a possible separate class, but I think it can be done with severity. I think it also helps to have a catch-all "general tasks" for when it isn't clear there is (yet) a suitable level to assign the issue to.
So one possible severity level list would be:
Note that in both the B-series and E-series, the lower number means greater significance.
Next up, some thoughts on priority.
The original post was in the category: software_craftsmanship but I'm still in the process of migrating categories over.