Bug Prioritization - What are the 5 levels of priority?
Last updated: March 01, 2024 Read in fullscreen view
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Prioritizing bugs based on their impact on the user experience will allow you to deliver a product that meets or exceeds customer expectations. By addressing high-priority bugs that directly affect critical functionality or cause significant inconveniences, you can improve overall user satisfaction and loyalty.
Standard priority rules
Each bug is assigned the first appropriate priority listed below from top to bottom.
P1 - Critical
- Any reproducible crash or hang.
- Any regression from a previous publicly released version.
- Serious problems on important sites due to site change or newly-important sites.
- Serious security issue.
- The deadline can be either ASAP, same-day, or next-day turnaround
P2 - High priority
These bugs are very important and must be completed ASAP. Because these bugs are not time-sensitive, this type of bug comes second on the priority scale after critical bugs.
Bugs are high-priority when:
- Site that does not function in some non-trivial way.
- Serious performance complaints.
- Site that has really bad cosmetic problems (e.g., content overlapping such that it’s very hard to read).
- Unreproducible crash or hang that has been reported many times.
- Deadline can be within a couple of days or end of the week.
P3 - Medium
- Site that works but has some cosmetic problems.
- Minor performance complaints, such as trivial memory leaks
- rchitecture issues that could help with correctness or performance but are not a clear win in advance.
- Unreproducible crash or hang.
- Deadlines are outlined.
P4 - Low priority
All enhancement requests and feature requests did not cover the criteria for P1, P2, or P3.
P5 - Unknown
P5 is not used for bugs. At TIGO, we shares its Bugzilla or Redmine with other projects who might use it, that’s why it’s still there.
Common adjustments to priority
- If there is a workaround, the priority may be moved down.
- If a bug gets a lot of duplicates, the priority may be moved up.
- If a bug is getting a lot of public attention, the priority may be moved up.
- If a bug is on a very important site, the priority may be moved up.
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