Defect severities, part 5 - Handbook of Software Reliability Engineering
Posted April 27, 2006 in miscMichael Lyu’s Handbook of Software Reliability Engineering feels a bit like the “important, very important, extremely important” mind hack, but without the irony:
- Catastrophic – Total system failure. No functionality left.
- Severe – Important customer feature isn’t working
- Significant – Customer workaround needed
- Minor – Customer wouldn’t notice
Not bad actually. Respects the customers feelings of urgency, while reserving the highest severity for a very small subset of failures.
In my opinion the “loophole” is Severe: “important customer feature”. This severity will be fudged. An improvement would be to specify who (e.g. customer product management team) or what (marketing brochure) says which feature is important.