Priority
// Definition
A classification of how urgently a defect must be fixed, set by product management based on business impact, release schedule, and customer commitment. Priority answers 'when should this be fixed?' — a cosmetic defect on a high-traffic page may be P1 urgency despite low severity, while a rare data-loss bug may be deferred to a future release (P3) despite high severity. Priority drives sprint planning; severity drives technical risk assessment. The two dimensions are deliberately independent to give product and engineering separate levers.
// Related terms
Severity
A rating of how badly a defect affects the system or users, independent of when it should be fixed. Common levels: critical (system unusable or data loss), major (core feature broken with no workaround), minor (non-critical degradation), trivial (cosmetic only). Severity measures impact; priority measures urgency — a cosmetic bug on the login page might be low severity but high priority for a public launch.
Severity vs Priority
Severity describes how broken the system is (set by QA, technical impact). Priority describes how urgently it should be fixed (set by Product, business impact). The two are independent — a typo can be Trivial / P0.
Triage
The process of reviewing newly filed defects to assess, categorise, and assign them — setting severity, priority, target release, and owner. Triage meetings bring together QA, product, and engineering to make these decisions collectively rather than leaving them to individuals. The goal is a prioritised, actionable backlog: critical issues routed immediately, lower-priority issues scheduled, and unclear reports returned for more information. Triage is also applied after a failed test run to sort failures into genuine new defects, known issues, flaky tests, and environment problems.
Defect
A flaw in a software system that causes it to behave in an unintended or incorrect way — also called a bug or fault. A defect arises when actual behaviour diverges from expected behaviour defined by requirements or specification. In QA workflow, a defect is formally logged with reproduction steps, severity, and priority, then tracked through the bug lifecycle from discovery to verified closure. The distinction that matters in practice: an error is the human mistake, a fault is the resulting code flaw, and a failure is the observable incorrect behaviour at runtime.