How Critical and Urgent is your Defect ?
What is it ?
We Testers often find it difficult to define Priority and Severity of a bug. The terms ‘Critical’ and ‘Urgent’ means the same as the terms ‘Severity’ and ‘Priority’ which are very much used in Bug Tracking System. The former terms are just listed under the later terms as options in the drop down, as simple :)
On a further note many of the Testers are also often confused and question the terms ‘Defect’ and ‘Bug’. How closely these terms mean the same or how closely they are termed different??
Defect, the variation in the expected and actual results usually caused by human error.
It is something which does not meet a software requirement.
We call it as ‘Bug’ when we see something is not working on the surface as expected.
Now comes the How part ..
Few checkpoints which will definitely clear your confusion how critical and urgent your defect is :
‘Urgent’ impacts Business where ‘Critical’ impacts application.
- Sometimes the urgency is defined by the Client, Manager, Team Lead in accordance with the end user’s risk assessment, mostly defined by Tester while filing Defects/Bugs in Bug Tracking System and based on this Developer understands its critical view and gets an idea of its urgency and fixes it.
- Very essential for a tester to interact with the project team, analyze and dig through the requirements and always think as end users perspective while testing any application. It will surely clear confusion while filing and assigning defect’s status.
- When its urgent, it just means how fast a defect can be fixed and when its critical it means how severe it is and hence, needs to be taken care of`asap.
- Mathematically, ‘Urgent’ is directly proportional to ‘Critical’.
If a defect is critical by nature then it is to be fixed first and if not, can be fixed later. How long it shall take to fix is dependent on how critical and complex your defect is, as a result making the defect an urgent one.
P.S. Do not forget sometimes we have to abide by the project’s need as well.
- Scheduling and Standards go hand in hand, anything against Standards decide severity i.e. how critical your defect is and as a result that decides priority i.e. how urgent your defect is.
For testers, its very important to set correct ‘Critical’ and ‘Urgent’ bugs while filing in any given Bug Tracking System because that will help developers in a way resolve down much genuine (Critical) bugs in lesser(Urgent) time. Ponder !
Written By: – Anisha Nayak, QA Engineer, Mindfire Solutions
