Defect Metrics
Defect Metrics
Active Defects:
1. Active defects by severity and priority
2. Active defects by assignee
3. Active defects by group
3. Active defects by group, subgroup
All Defects:
1. Number of active, resolved and closed defects
2. Defects by severity and priority
3. Defects by assignee
4. Defects by group
5. Defects by group, subgroup
"Triage" is a medical term. It refers to dividing wounded or sick people into three
categories: those who will die no matter what you do, those who will recover even if
unaided, and those who will recover only if aided. In a situation where there's too
much to do, you must concentrate on the third group.
Bug Triage Meetings (sometimes called Bug Councils) are project meetings in which
open bugs are divided into categories. The most important distinction is between
bugs that will not be fixed in this release and those that will be
There are three categories for the medical usage, software also three categories -
bugs to fix now, bugs to fix later, and bugs we'll never fix
Triaging a bug involves:
Making sure the bug has enough information for the developers and makes sense
Making sure the bug has sensible "Severity" and "Priority" fields
Priority is Business;
Severity is Technical
In Triages, team will give the Priority of the fix based on the business
perspective. They will check “How important is it to the business that we fix the
bug?” In most of the times high Severity bug is becomes high Priority bug, but it
is not always. There are some cases where high Severity bugs will be low Priority
and low Severity bugs will be high Priority.
In most of the projects I worked, if schedule drawn closer to the release, even if
the bug severity is more based on technical perspective, the Priority is given as low
because the functionality mentioned in the bug is not critical to business.
Priority and Severity gives the excellent metrics to identify overall health of the
Project. Severity is customer-focused while priority is business-focused.
Assigning Severity for a bug is straightforward. Using some general guidelines
about the project, testers will assign Severity but while assigning a priority is
much more juggling act. Severity of the bug is one of the factors for assigning
priority for a bug. Other considerations are might be how much time left for
schedule, possibly ‘who is available for fix’, how important is it to the business to
fix the bug, what is the impact of the bug, what are the probability of occurrence
and degree of side effects are to be considered.
Severity
---------------
3. Bug causes minor functionality problems, may affect "fit anf finish".
4. Bug contains typos, unclear wording or error messages in low visibility fields.
Priority
---------------
1. Must fix as soon as possible. Bug is blocking further progress in this area.
Attributes of Defect
Examples:
· Annual report print functionality not working – High severity and low
priority issue
Components of Bug
Title of bug
Severity of bug
Priority of bug
Bug type
Module name
Assigned to
Project manager
Steps to reproduce
Actual output
Expected output
Attachment of log and screen shot
Comments
Test environment – browser, OS information etc
Build date and platform
Be precise
Be clear – explain it so other can reproduce the bug
Mention exact steps to reproduce with details
Provide sufficient test environment details
Mention build date and number with details
When you close your bug mention on which build and date you
verify it, so in future if require to reopen it we can have track on which
build it works last
Report the problem immediately
Reproduce the bug at least one more time before post it
Test the same bug occurrence on the other similar module of the
application
Read bug report before submit it or send it
Never ever criticize any developer or any individual
Bug Impacts
Low impact
This is for Minor problems, such as failures at extreme boundary conditions that are unlikely to
occur in normal use, or minor errors in layout/formatting. These problems do not impact use of
the product in any substantive way.
Medium impact
This is a problem that a) Effects a more isolated piece of functionality. b) Occurs only at certain
boundary conditions. c) Has a workaround (where "don't do that" might be an acceptable answer
to the user). d) Occurs only at one or two customers. or e) Is very intermittent
High impact
This should be used for only serious problems, effecting many sites, with no workaround.
Frequent or reproducible crashes/core dumps/GPFs would fall in this category, as would major
functionality not working.
Urgent impact
This should be reserved for only the most catastrophic of problems. Data corruption, complete
inability to use the product at almost any site, etc. For released products, an urgent bug would
imply that shipping of the product should stop immediately, until the problem is resolved.