Why there is no Priority 'Normal' by default?

[Sebastian Wolter]

I am wondering why there is no priority 'Normal' by default?
Is this part of the Agile school to only have Minor and Major?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

I think it's mostly based on the way the English language works to native speakers - major, minor, trivial, blocker etc, they all imply a sense of relative importance or urgency.

"Normal" does not really carry any relative importance like the other words in use there, you won't find English speakers using it in any scale of things, it's a word that means "not unusual".

[Sebastian Wolter]

'unprioritised' does not match, because it is priorised.
But my question is answered in the way that it is not related to Agile itself; it's just not common.
So thx for your answers guys. :-)

[Sebastian Wolter]

Allright.
When we first set up Jira 2012 we missed 'normal', so we created it ourself with a green dash as icon. We got used to it, so after a new setup some days ago I had to created it again and was wondering why there is no priority for 'none', 'normal' out of the box. We like to use it for issues that straight go into backlog, like new nice-to-have features. Marking them as 'minor' feels to us like they are not important, which they are in a way, but not urgent.

@Nic: Yes, 'normal' in deed does not make sense here. I could call it 'none', but compared to 'trivial' it sounds even less important, instead of between 'major' and 'minor'.
I could easily follow the default logic, if an new issue would not have a (default) priority when creating. But if I have to pick any, often none of the shiped really fits.

I was more expecting an answer like 'The philosophy of Agile is that the user should always priorize.'. :-)

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I think it's more up to the project lead to prioritise, especially bugs. One user screaming that their text is green instead of blue might well be a Major priority for them, but most teams would rate "200 users can't enter data properly" as a higher priority!

One thing I've seen in a lot of places - an "unprioritised" by default. That makes it clear that no one has yet compared it with the rest of the pile of stuff that needs doing, and suggests that it needs to be done. I think that's probably better than "none" or "normal"

[Alexey_Rjeutski__Polontech_]

Most users consider Major is normal. If you wish to enter custom priority - please find https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Defining+Priority+Field+Values link. As most companies install fresh jira not very often - the question of defaults is not so valuable, so there is most common practice to have trivial, minor, major, critical and blocker defects. As I remember that came from the earlier versions of jira.

[Alexey_Rjeutski__Polontech_]

see

http://downloads.atlassian.com/software/jira/docs/v2.1/priorities.html

http://downloads.atlassian.com/software/jira/docs/v3.13/priorities.html

for history ) that was before agile