[2175] in Release_Engineering
Re: Severity levels of bug reports
wesommer@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (wesommer@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Thu Feb 15 00:09:59 1990
To add stuff from a different corporate culture, apollo uses the
following levels, from least to most serious.
W: wish/request for enhancement.
P3: minor bug; workaround is obvious (or is "don't do that"); OK to ship
without this bug fixed.
P2: bug: a workaround exists, but shouldn't ship next release without
this fixed
P1: major bug, either with no workaround or involving system crash or
potential loss of data. (If there's no workaround, the
reporter is free to spend all of his/her time finding a small
reproducable test case or otherwise helping the developer to
find a fix...)
P0: same as P1 and occasionally P2, except that its existance irritates a
Major Customer....
(the obvious equivalent here is a bug that seriously inconveniences
one of the big courses using Athena...).
There are weekly charts prepared showing the "defect metric" vs. time
of a software product (metric is something like #P3 + 5*#P2 + 9 * #P1
+ <large constant> * #P0), with numbers for "new", "just fixed", and
"currently unfixed" bugs; this way you *know* when you're
backsliding & need more resources..
- Bill
