In a previous post, I was proposing to reduce the number of defect priorities to three. In the project I work on we currently have five. Elements in the last two gather dust (so to speak) because no one is looking at them. We know that things that stand in these priorities will never be fixed.

It made me wonder why we picked five priorities. I suppose it was an attempt at having fine grained prioritisation. In practice however we only use three priorities: must fixed in the next day because something really important and central is broken, must fixed before next release because the users cannot live with it and the fix when you have time/opportunity defects.

That makes three priority levels. And it ensures none of the reported defects falls into oblivion. I am under the impression that this combined with a defect time value and putting defects reported by users in the first two priorities would help manage defects in a sensible manner.

What is your practice ? How many priority levels do you use ? Is it that we have too many defects, period ?

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 14th, 2009 at 4:12 am and is filed under Agile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.