Malone's Severity and Priority are soon to be replaced by Importance

[Jan Claeys]

Op zo, 14-05-2006 te 13:00 +1200, schreef Matthew Paul Thomas:
> On May 13, 2006, at 6:38 AM, Jan Claeys wrote:
> >
> > Op vr, 12-05-2006 te 13:43 +0200, schreef Dennis Kaarsemaker:
> >>
> >> Severity is the impact of the bug on end users, priority is/should be
> >> the order in which bugs are fixed.
> >
> > I think what Dennis means is that a bug that is annoying (but nothing
> > more) for almost all users will often have a higher priority to be 
> > fixed than a crasher (and possible dataloss) bug that impact 0.00001% 
> > of the userbase.
> > ...
> 
> Sure, I understand that. What I don't understand is why Malone should 
> record severity in that case. If it's not being used to prioritize 
> fixes, what use is it? The answer to that question has to be worth more 
> than the cost of the extra complexity in Malone. Currently, we don't 
> think it is. 

I would say severity is one quantification used to decide about the
priority.  And only one of several, others being e.g. the number of
users impacted, the expected time/cost of a fix, etc.

A bounty being available doesn't necessarily mean a feature request is
of critical or high severity, while a (community) developer might still
consider it a high or even highest priority...

So I think with this change you might lose 1 (possibly useful, if it's
used correctly) piece of information.

I agree priority should only be set by developers and their "managers"
though (and only if they want to--IMHO this is a work/project management
functionality, while severity is a way to represent some data about the
bug itself).


-- 
Jan Claeys