I am looking for Field Severity for Issue Type Bug but could not found any.
I can create a custom field but it should be pre-defined for bug.
Hi @Prashant Neharkar , by default Severity field does not exist. You can certainly add it as a dropdown list single-select.
As @Jack Brickey says JIRA doesn't have severity. It uses Priority for that function. I add a severity for bugs and use priority for CR issues.
It is by design - when Mike and Scott were writing "something that works better than Bugzilla or its competitors", they actively decided to drop Severity because people creating issues almost always got it wrong, and it was not of any real use to developers.
With the provision of custom fields, the people who do find it useful can add it, and should when it's useful for their processes. But it should not be pre-defined - most Jira users don't need or want it.
That makes sense, @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- , but I do wonder on why they chose to call the field Priority and not use the term Severity.
Considering that the Priority field values are Major, Minor, etc., people rightly consider that to mark how severe (impact) the issue is.
Priority, meanwhile, relates more to when an issue should be handled, which can be managed by using the backlog ranking, Sprint value, Fix Version, etc.
Your thoughts?
Priority and Severity have very different meanings in English, and I think you have completely understood that.
Severity = how bad is it
Priority = how important it is
Atlassian went for Priority and dumped Severity simply because humans don't understand either of them, but Priority is easier to explain and more useful for sorting.
In fact, neither of these should be presented to the person raising issues. They're always going to over-rate them. Priority should be determined by the product owners, and feed into how they rank it. Severity is useful to know, but is usually highly subjective and needs to be balanced against Impact before it has a lot to say.
Think "Severity = system unusable" - yep, very severe. But that's utterly useless without a scale - "system unusable for one person" is severe, but a low priority (and hence rank) when the other 49,999 people in the organisation can use it, it really isn't a priority when the other issue is 20,000 people can't see some information because it's the wrong colour in the display.
Great points, @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- , which I agree with.
Indeed, one of the things we do at my work is have regular Bug review meetings to come to agreement on how bad something is, how important it is, and when we think best to dedicate time to fix and verify it.
Thanks for always providing quick and informative information and food-for-thought here in the Atlassian Community!
How can you get the custom Severity dropdown to use the priority values(with the colors)?
Custom fields don't have the functionality of the priority field, so I'm afraid you don't get the colours and icons that priority supports.
How strange to say humans don't understand the concept of priority & severity. Its pretty simple... Severity focuses on the bug's impact on software. Priority focuses on the bugs impact on the business. Without both you cant get a true picture of the impact of the bug. Its industry standard and I would argue bug artefacts should have both fields as default
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