Interesting comments

Adam Williamson awilliam at redhat.com
Wed Mar 11 16:44:28 UTC 2009


On Wed, 2009-03-11 at 11:10 +0900, John Summerfield wrote:
> Adam Williamson wrote:
> 
> > 
> > Priority and severity can be set by reporters in MDV Bugzilla. It was my
> > experience that reporters would frequently inflate these values in their
> > initial reports. However, if a triage team member then re-set them to a
> 
> Last I looked (which was a while ago) there was no apparent definition 
> of that these mean. Let me think:
> Critical - system unusable
> Serious - system usable with some impairment, or critical but with a 
> workaround.
> Moderate - causes occasional outages, misleading diagnostic messages
> Cosmetic - spelling/grammar errors
> Enhancement Request - not exactly a bug, but ....
> 
> Everyone would probably agree that, if the system won't boot, that is 
> critical. I would expect such a critical error would be a candidate 
> release blocker.
> 
> Probably, most would also reckon that a daily crash would qualify as 
> critical, as would any major component such as X failing.

Here are my definitions from the MDV pages I linked to:

---

For Priority:

The release_critical priority is only relevant to bugs filed on Cooker
or beta releases, and should only be used for issues which are
sufficiently critical that it would severely impair the overall quality
of a release if it were made available without the issue being resolved.
The high priority should be used for issues which are sufficiently
critical that resolving them should take priority over resolving other
issues, but which do not meet the criteria for release_critical. The low
priority should be used for bugs which are sufficiently trivial and/or
limited in impact that resolving other issues should take precedence.
The normal priority should be used for all other issues. 

For Severity:

The critical severity should be used for bugs which render a package
essentially unusable (for instance, crashes which would affect the
majority of uses of a package, or total inability to install or run the
package). The major severity should be used for issues which render a
significant feature of the package unusable, or which render the package
generally unstable. The minor severity should be used for issues which
have only a limited impact on the usability of a package or which will
only affect a small minority of users or use cases, and the trivial
severity should be used for issues which have almost no material impact
on the usability of a package. The normal severity should be used for
all other issues.

---

(Mandriva's values are slightly different from the ones in Fedora, but
you can see my general scheme.)

What's not 100% clearly explained in the above is the distinction
between priority and severity. Severity is how bad the bug is. Priority
is how quickly it needs to be fixed. These obviously relate to each
other, but they are not the same thing. Most obviously, the importance
of the package to the distribution matters to Priority but not to
Severity.

A crasher bug is always high severity, but if it's in a package that
only three people in the world use, or a package that's just not very
important (xeyes, say), then it's not high priority.

A broken icon or typo is low severity, but if it's something highly
visible - say, it's right on the default desktop - it may be high
priority.

That's how I look at them, anyway.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net




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