Priority and severity

Question

If the 9 key is pressed 10 times in a mobile phone, then phone reboots. What would the priority and severity be?

I answered "low priority, high severity." Would the answer be "high severity and high priority?"

I answered low priority because a person will not usually try to enter the 9 key 10 times. It will be a rare scenario on this interviewer question. If I'm told: "what if 9999999999 this number is one of the emergency kind of numbers like we dial 100 for police or 112 for distress?"

Answer 1

"The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do." - Michael Porter.

As I see it, Priority is more subjective term compared to severity is more objective one.

Priority has meaning in context of business impact(how many users may enter 9 key 10 times?) whereas severity is more about technical impact of the issue(system restarting)on the system.

I think the reason it's again and again brought up in interviews, to evaluate the perspective of an tester .

A tester can discover thousands of weird ways to bring a system on its knees however as long a real user will never do that , it's means nothing to business.On the other hand if the color of a button in UI is highly unintutive to an user , that's more important to business hence should in turn be important to tester as well.

Every tester needs to understand this on fundamental level that what is important to do and more importantly what not to do.

Answer 2

interview is not a quiz but a discussion to understand candidates thought process, confidence, human quality, how he handles counter thoughts etc.

The points put forward is completely correct as having a mobile number as 999999999 is really low. But not impossible i guess , so its a low priority and high severity.

So setting up priority for this bug is tricky, the best approach is to have a risk analysis:

1. seeing probability of such a number exists
2. probability of number 9 being used to play games
3. user base that uses number 999999999
4. user base of users who travels to the destination that has 9999999999 as the number
5. work around available
6. Comparison with competitor handsets

And so on. so "risk analysis" is the key term when priority comes in mind.