I still have some team members asking for the severity field. Some old articles linked here don't come up. Can someone remind me why it was removed?
Because every Bugzilla that Mike and Scott ran into had a severity field that contained utter rubbish. They dumped the field because it was (and still is) usually useless. I still work with systems where it's built in, or been added, and that still stands.
It's not that the idea of a severity is wrong, the problem is that to a human raising issues, the severity is not quantitative, it's subjective. Every issue is "severe" to the person raising it.
Consider a simple case: My cat is ill. That's critical to her, very important to me and the vet that I take her to, mildly upsetting to the neighbours and friends who like her and utterly irrelevant to the rest of the world. What severity would you choose?
Severity was dumped because it's subjective and hence useless. When you do think you have a need for it, use a custom field to gather the information, but quantify it, or better, replace it with a proper measurable set of fields - Impact (how many people affected) and Functional loss (trivial being something the wrong colour and critical meaning the application just crashes so it's totally broken)
Thank you, seems to make sense when at the end of the day the question is "what should be fixed next based on priority". One of our teams wants to use "fix priority" in addition to "priority" - hoping that works in terms of "fix priority" for a given sprint...
Your QC requirements should describe Severity statuses for bugs. For example, 'Highest' severity for core functional, 'Medium' for secondary functional, 'Low' - UI, 'Blocker' - obviously crashes, stoppers etc. Meanwhile priority should be defined per task by one responsible person/group.
Nope, that's a priority, not a severity. And you still have the problem that it is subjective and hence generally of no use. By all means capture your descriptions in a field, but do not call it "severity", because it's not.
Nic, let me answer your example
1. how objective it is - it may be based on a risk analysis. Such an approach is more or less objective. Even if it's subjective, but set by one person named PO consistently - this is acceptable.
2. My understanding of your example about cat:
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