Why setting priority of your JIRA bugs is critical and hard

JIRA is one of the most popular tool used by software teams to manage the bugs. What I have seen over and over again, many teams and managers find it tough to give right priority to the bugs. And moreover they spend lot of time in bug scrubs and sprint planning.

Well, we need to go through 2 keywords before we proceed:

• Priority —This signifies the precedence of the bugs. Higher the priority more important it is as of now. Priority is relative.
• Severity — This shows the impact of the issue.

Significance of Priority & Severity

Priority defines the order in which the developers pick up the issues to fix. A bug can have high severity but may not be relevant in the sprint so it will get low priority.

Consider priority as the rank of the bug

What needs to be done! Frequently visit the backlog and change priority of the items based on the current business requirements.

Common mistakes

• Teams don’t prioritise the issues constantly.
• All issues are marked P1. If all bugs are P1 then nothing is P1.
• Severity is given more importance than priority. Issue might be severe but may not be of high priority for business.

Questions to ask

• Does the bug severely effect the main use case of the product? Top Priority
• Security compromised? Top Priority
• Impact on Customer experience — Unusable? Top Priority
• Frequent performance degradation leaves system unusable?
• Frequent Crashes?
• Is the bug not in the main use-case?
• Performance degradation but the system is stable?
• and many more …

Based on such questions the priority of the bugs can be decided.

Happy prioritising …