[wtp-dev] On the Correct Use of Bug Severities

[Arthur Ryman <ryman@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On our status call today it became apparent
that there is a lot of variability in the use of the Severity field. We
need to triage the bugs for WTP 1.0 so it's important that we adopt a consistent
use of severities. Although this is somewhat of a judgement call, we should
use the standard definitions [1].

All component owners should double check
the Blocker/Critical/Major bugs to make sure they are accurately described.
Thx.

Here are the definitions:

Severity
This field describes the impact of a bug.

Blocker	Blocks development and/or testing work
Critical	crashes, loss of data, severe memory leak
Major	major loss of function
Minor	minor loss of function, or other problem where easy workaround is present
Trivial	cosmetic problem like misspelled words or misaligned text
Enhancement	Request for enhancement

A user may feel strongly about their
favourite bug, but we should still classify it correctly. We do have some
leeway in assigning it a priority, i.e.if we feel that a bug should be
fixed, we can up its priority. P1 should be reserved for release-defining
functions, .i.e we stop ship if P1's are not fixed.

Priority
This field describes the importance and order in which
a bug should be fixed. This field is utilized by the programmers/engineers
to prioritize their work to be done. The available priorities range from
P1 (most important) to P5 (least important.) 

[1] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/bug_status.html#bug_severity

Arthur Ryman,
IBM Software Group, Rational Division

blog: http://ryman.eclipsedevelopersjournal.com/
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