Quality assurance (QA) professionals can analyze the performance, functionality, system, and other features of a piece of software they are testing, but they cannot ensure that the software they release to the market does not include any defects.
Inevitably, it’s essential to find and fix as many issues as possible before a product goes public. While performing functional or performance testing is a great way to fix bugs, another essential step that developers can take is to classify and prioritize bugs.
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Why Prioritize And Classify Bugs?
This phase of the SDLC is essential for a variety of reasons. The most crucial is ensuring the team prioritizes fixing the bugs impacting the product’s reception among its target audience. Skipping this critical step (or rather, sequence of steps) could lead to you spending unnecessary time worrying about minor details.
Creating a system will help with organization, speeding up the development and quality assurance phases. Because software development is complex, staying organized will help.
A method like this will also help direct your team’s efforts. The team will be better able to prioritize fixes for critical issues before they spread throughout the product and roll out exciting new features.
Organizing Via Priority And Severity:
Priority and severity rankings are well-established methods for categorizing and prioritizing issues.
1. Ranking By Priority:
Most software development firms employ some grading system for categorizing issues, typically ranging from very high priority to very low priority. The priority of a bug is a reference to its recommended fixing order. What this means is, how many other bugs can wait till you fix this one? For the most part, the correlation between the ranks looks like this:
- High Priority: Most of your customer base is having trouble using the product because of the glitch. You should focus on this as soon as you’ve finished fixing the most critical issues.
- Medium: Some customers may find the glitch annoying. It’s not an emergency, but you should get to it as soon as possible.
- Low: While the flaw is noticeable, you do not expect it to impact most customers using your product. Until then, you should move on to fixing more critical bugs.
- Very Low: Very few people will notice this bug, which will only slightly affect their use of the product. This bug is probably hard to reproduce, so you may put off fixing it for now.
2. Ranking by Severity:
You measure a defect’s severity by its potential for wide-ranging, adverse effects on the system. Concerning importance, this is how the severity works:
- Very High: Users can use the product only if the developers fix it.
- High Severity: There are frequent problems with the product’s operation, performance, or usage.
- Medium: The bug is manageable for the software but affects the end result.
- Low: The defect hardly has any adverse effect on the essential capabilities of the product.
- Very Low: The problem does not affect the product’s functionality or primary features.
3. Creating a Severity and Priority Matrix:
To prioritize fixing issues, you should analyze your past experiences and organize your findings into a matrix. To better understand the potential impact of each event on your project, you can divide it into quadrants based on the importance and severity of the reported issues.
The Things to Remember
1). Figure Out How Each Flaw Affects Your Customers
Severity and priority are intertwined since they both impact the end result. However, there are situations when you might have to balance competing concerns. A problem may have high severity and low priority, suggesting that it would render the system unusable for some but not all users.
On the other hand, a defect can be of moderate severity and high priority if it affects the large majority of your customer base but doesn’t compromise the system’s overall operation or usefulness.
Where can you even begin to choose between these two indicators? User satisfaction is often the deciding factor. Consider the end-user experience in light of the defect; this will allow you to determine how much time and effort you should allocate to it, how important it is, and if you need to perform functional testing.
2). Make Assumptions
When the QA or development team reports a bug, you should take their word for its functionality unless you have evidence to the contrary. For instance, until you learn otherwise, believe that the bug only affects the specified group of users identified by the QA team.
To the same extent, if the bug only affects one portion of the system, treat that section as independent from the rest until you can prove otherwise. As you gain experience assessing the quality of various products and systems, your organization may define additional metrics to identify and prioritize defects. Still, these are reasonable principles to follow when getting started.
3). Software Integration
To build a comprehensive IT infrastructure, you can leverage software testing tools. HeadSpin gives you access to SIM-enabled, on-demand devices that you use to perform comprehensive tests. Reach out!
Conclusion:
In conclusion, prioritizing and classifying bugs is an essential step in the software development life cycle to ensure that critical issues are fixed before they impact the product’s reception among its target audience. By creating a system that categorizes issues by priority and severity, development teams can better organize their efforts, speed up the development and quality assurance phases, and direct their focus on critical issues.
It is crucial to consider how each flaw affects the end-user experience and balance competing concerns between severity and priority. Leveraging software testing tools like HeadSpin can also help build a comprehensive IT infrastructure and perform comprehensive tests to ensure the quality of the product.
