Clicks & Notes

10 February 2005

Managing Defects by Severity and Frequency

Managing Product Development - Managing Defects by Severity and Frequency

I’m familiar with managing defects by severity (how bad the problem is for the user if the user encounters the problem), and by priority (what’s the business value of fixing this problem), but I had lunch yesterday with some folks who use frequency of occurrence to also manage defects.

Here are their definitions:

1 - High: Encountered by many users, including downstream teams, in their normal course of work (> 10% of the user community or > 100 individual users)

2 - Medium: Encountered by some users, including downstream teams, in their normal course of work

3 - Low: Encountered by few users, including downstream teams, in their normal course of work (< 1% of the user community and < 10 individual users)

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