Forget the definitions, just understand the situation

This is one question which has been part of most of the ‘QA’ interviews I take. I enjoy asking this question because it seems like the ‘testers’ are thoroughly confused about this, I put them through scenarios, and finally explain to them the difference. More than interviewing I think I like to play the part of the teacher and hope that my explanation stays with them!

What is the difference between severity and priority?

Oh they struggle to give the right answer, they try their best to recall the definitions and sometimes end up giving the correct answer!

I told someone recently to forget QA and think English! So ‘ severe’ means ‘extremely bad’ so if you want to label the severity of a bug, you analyse how bad that is, the impact it has on the functioning of the application/product, the damage it can do etc. etc. If the impact is high, the severity will be high and so on and so forth.

Now ‘priority’ in English would always define the importance so the priority of fixing a bug would be per the importance it would have on the customer or the end user. You would classify a bug to be of high priority if you want that to be fixed before others.

Simple, isn’t it?

And of course I would repeat the most common example of a website home page logo. If it was distorted, or wrongly spelt, it wouldn’t have much of an impact on the functionality of the website and so the severity of the bug would be low. However the customer experience, the brand name would suffer and hence it is important that the bug is fixed on priority. So here is this a classic example of a high priority but low severity issue.

And as you keep on using an application/product, you would know the impact or the importance of the modules/functionalities being tested. And still if you are in doubt, ask the business or the functional analyst!