Let me start by a quote from a developer. “We only focus on priority.”
I have had so many conversations around severity and
priority. Rather than banter about the
difference and the usages, I came up with a new concept relative to defects.
Equality to all defects!
I would like to see teams implement TDD practices and a
mantra of “We found it. We will fix it!”
Imagine a world where developers, testers, and product managers all
treat every defect equally. We cannot
release new code because it is defective.
In the Agile development world the best teams fix their
defects as they build the product.
Testers are catching them early in the process, so why not fix
them. It is true that there is no such
thing as perfect software; however, if you happen to find an imperfection
should you ignore it. The answer is no.
Do you ever hear “We are do busy to fix defects”? Or “that
is just cosmetic, so we will fix it later”?
The statements indicate that defects are not important.
All defects should be treated with equal importance no matter
where they are found. In fact if a
customer finds a defect it should take on greater importance. The defect should be fixed immediately in the
next sprint. If the team uses Kanban
then push the defect to the top of the queue.
If we treated all defects as equals then we can throw out
severity and priority. Most importantly
we testers no longer have to explain that there is truly a difference.