Secondary functionality is unavailable but has a reasonable workaround.Important functionality is unavailable but has a reasonable workaround.Important functionality is unavailable with no workaround.Data loss, data corruption or system unavailable.The following table provides suggested wording for the ranking of the Severity of a defect. Affects a minimal set of users and/or a very small range of system functionality.Affects a small set of users and/or a small range of system functionality.Affects a moderate set of users and/or moderate range of system functionality.Affects a large set of users and/or large range of system functionality.Affects most or all users and/or a very larger range of system functionality.The following table provides suggested wording for the ranking of the Scope of a defect. While these are the vectors I use, you are welcome to use your own as they may more accurately reflect your specific business reality. data loss, data corruption, cosmetic issues, etc… Severity: How critical is the defect i.e.Scope: How many users are affected or how much of the system is affected.For the purposes of assessing the priority of software defects, I have found that the following two vectors provide the right balance: Clearly there are different drivers in play here and thus, different vectors are needed. To illustrate the difference, consider that while prime time news is unlikely to run stories about features missing from your product, it might run a story about the devastating impact of a software defect in your product. this is because Urgency and Business Value do not accurately reflect the fact that there are material differences between adding functionality to a system and fixing something that is broken. Instead of Urgency and Business Value, I use Scope and Severity for ranking defects. The vectors for ranking bugs, however, are different. This post proposes a nearly identical mechanism and use of the same two vector matrix. In my previous post How To Easily Prioritize Your Agile Stories I presented a simple ranking mechanism for assessing and prioritizing Agile Stories and using those rankings to determine their sequence and into which sprint a Story will be placed. So assuming you don’t have the media telling your CEO what your top priorities are, you need a process for focusing your attention on the most important things first. Some issues are much more important than others and you can bet, if a software defect is featured on prime time TV news broadcasts that it will be the first thing your CEO will want addressed. The list seems endless and all of it is important (or at least most of it is). Those drivers could be the Sales Team, QA Team, Finance, End Users, Customers, and Online Media such as Blogs, Twitter and Internet Forums as well as Traditional Media. The question is “How do you make those determinations?” There are multiple drivers in any organization that concurrently push and pull the development team in any number of directions. Unless you have unlimited resources to assign to bug fixes, you have to focus your attention on the ones that have the highest ROI. Like most things in this universe there is a law of diminishing returns when it applies to the correction of software defects. If left unresolved, some defects can have cataclysmic consequences while others are so minor that they go unnoticed by virtually everyone. Defect Card (from flickr - listentoreason)Īll software has defects of some sort – we know that.
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