Long before the software industry discovered agile and DevOps methodologies and techniques, there was long standing competition between resolving bugs and delivering on time. It was common for the project teams to be challenged by the idea of which bugs and defects to prioritize and which ones should be ignored. Given that there are major elements like resource allocation, invested time, budgets, and testing efforts are also contingent on the prioritization of the bugs, it is an essential part of quality assurance processes.

How Defect Management Facilitates Prioritization of Bugs

Instead of analyzing the nature of each bug and then resolving it, the teams are much better off (in terms of time and cost) to establish a defect policy which helps the project managers to determine which bugs to fix and how long is the process likely to take. By deriving valuable insights from the defect management tool, like defect trends and patterns based on historic behavior, managers can devise various policies to suit the needs of the development project. One defect policy could be based on the severity and impact of the bug, for instance, any defect or issue which disrupts the current sprint in a major way or has an adverse impact on user experience dramatically should be given the highest priority. On the other hand, another defect policy could be that bugs which are outliers and occur in only extreme circumstances so that they do not hinder the users from performing critical tasks should be delayed until there is more time. This way of creating and developing policies is called prioritization by the means of policy. More specifically, policies can be defined by the urgency of the bugs, as any defect or issue which delays the launch of a product or obscures it from being published needs to be resolved as soon as possible. In addition to this, some policies for prioritizing bugs can be categorized by the timeline of bugs or the project. There are two major metrics which are used to formulate the bug policies;

Likelihood of defects: this metric measures how often is the bug likely to occur

Severity of defects: severity essentially measures the impact of bugs and issues on the product delivery and performance

Factors to Consider for Prioritizing Bug Fixes

A faster and more reliable method of classifying and resolving bugs is to adopt a systematic approach or policy based on relevant factors, instead of relying on guesswork. Defect management tools provide useful information about the bugs to the project teams. Some of the factors which can be taken into consideration while classifying bugs according to their priorities, include;

Seriousness of the bug – the way the reported issue or bug impacts the usability and the performance of the applications has a major role in determining its priority. It could vary from a minor issue which has an easy workaround, to a bug in the form of a large problem because of which the users are unable to log in or load a page or perform a function. Given that this has a direct impact on how the end users would feel about the application, priority of bugs is highly contingent in this factor.

Devices and browsers which are displaying the bug – it is important for the organization to know which devices and browsers are riddled by the reported bugs. Whether it affects all browsers or just windows 10, or it is generating problems on the older IOS versions on previous models of IPhone, ties into the significance of the issue. By taking into account the user base and the market information about the browsers and devices, organizations can decide in what order to deal with the bug. For instance, if it is only persistent in older, outdated versions, then the priority for that bug would be low.

Influence of the bug on user behavior – more specifically, the project managers can check to see what kind of behaviors are displayed by users in response to the bugs; this will come in handy for deciding the bug fixing priority. If the issues in the application system are leaving users angry enough to abandon the application altogether or leaving bad reviews about it, then it is obvious that the issue needs to be resolved as soon as possible.

Length of time for which the bug has prevailed – the longer the bug has been present in the system, the higher the fixing priority would be for that bug. On the other hand, if it has been active for months but it hasn’t caused many problems for the users, then it can be safely stated that it’s not that urgent.