Why You Need to Pay Attention to Bug Severity Levels

To ensure your organization delivers high-quality software, effective bug severity assessment can’t be an afterthought. A strong bug severity assessment strategy ensures that critical issues are addressed promptly, leading to a better user experience and a more efficient allocation of development resources.

But to build a robust bug severity assessment strategy, you must fully understand the levels of severity a bug can have. After learning each level of severity a bug can possess, your development teams can easily prioritize bug fixes, accurately allocate resources, speed up program releases, and effectively mitigate risk. 

The Need for Bug Severity Levels

When you encounter bugs in your code, it can be challenging to decide which ones should be fixed first. You don’t want to spend valuable time fixing the bugs you encountered first just to find that the last bug encountered is causing the most damage. 

By taking the steps to assess bug severity, you can ensure you are managing bugs to avoid any impact on fix prioritization, user experience, resource allocation, and risk mitigation.

Prioritization

Not all bugs are created equal. Accurately measuring bug severity informs teams of the urgency of each issue. When your development teams can easily identify the urgency of each bug, they can prioritize their resolution list effectively. 

User Experience

Bugs are one of the top reasons customers will stop using a product. High-severity bugs can ruin a customer’s experience with your company, potentially breeding distrust and reputational damage. If your team can quickly identify the high-severity bugs affecting your customer’s experience, you can save your business from potential customer churn.

Resource Allocation

When you know which bugs cause the most damage, it’s easier to allocate resources to your development teams efficiently. Addressing critical issues first ensures that no time, money, or effort is spent on bugs that don’t actually require it. 

Risk Mitigation

High-severity bugs can affect more than just your reputation and resources. If a critical bug falls to the back burner, it could cause widespread software failures — forcing more of your team to dedicate time to resolve it. When critical bugs are identified as early as possible, you can avoid overlooking them and save your software from potential damage. 

Types of Severity Levels

When measuring bug severity levels, it’s important to know the types of severity classification to ensure alignment across your development teams. Levels of severity can be classified as:

1. Low: Usually identified during the user interface testing stage, low-severity bugs have little impact on the function of your program. For example, slight discoloration of a graphic or a button being the wrong size than intended. 

2. Minor: Also commonly identified during the user interface testing stage, minor bugs don’t have much effect on a program’s basic functions, but they can be easily noticed by the user. For example, a piece of text is overflowing from its designated box. 

3. Major: A major bug affects widespread areas of the program and is commonly found during specific types of testing. For example, if you were testing usability and found that many of the buttons in your programs were unresponsive. 

4. Critical: Often connected to security issues, a critical bug can result in a program shutdown to prevent a data breach, data loss, or other risks. 

5. Blocker: A blocker bug halts the testing process of a program as it usually causes the program to crash in a certain testing stage, rendering it unusable. 

Putting Bug Severity Levels to Use

Now that you know why bug severity levels are necessary and the different types of bug severity, you can take what we’ve learned and put it into action. Below, we explore how you can prioritize bug fixes, adequately allocate resources, better manage program releases, and mitigate risks by measuring bug severity levels.

Prioritize Bug Fixes

Knowing a bug’s severity levels helps development teams prioritize which bugs must be addressed first. As critical and major bugs have a higher severity impact on a program, being able to identify which bugs fit the critical and major criteria enables development teams to fix them as soon as possible — ensuring that any significant issues are resolved promptly.

Giving the Right Resources at the Right Time

By categorizing bugs by severity, development teams can efficiently allocate their resources to all relevant teams and tasks. Critical and major bugs often require immediate attention as they could grow into a block — halting the development process until resolved. On the other hand, fixes for low and minor bugs can be scheduled for future releases.

Release Management

For most organizations, increasing the speed of time-to-market (TTM) is a critical part of software development. Bug severity levels can significantly impact a product’s TTM. Software releases may be delayed if critical bugs are identified to ensure that the software is not deployed with showstopper issues. 

Avoiding Risks 

Addressing critical bugs helps to mitigate risks associated with software failures, security vulnerabilities, or data loss. Resolving high-severity issues promptly will reduce the likelihood of these risks becoming a reality —  meaning a customer will not have to experience them firsthand. 

Automating Your Bug Resolution Strategy with Launchable

Though bug triage is a crucial factor in ensuring high-quality software and mitigating critical issues, it often takes up a solid chunk of your developers’ time and energy. But with an intelligent bug triage and defect management tool, you can optimize how your development teams categorize, prioritize, and identify the severity levels of software bugs.

With an AI-powered tool like Launchable’s Intelligent Test Failure Diagnostics, your team can quickly resolve bottlenecks caused by bugs — letting them focus on more innovative work. Launchable provides your development team with a full, comprehensive view of test sessions to increase your TTM and reduce time spent on the tedious tasks required for traditional bug triage methods.