Stage 2 · Lesson 6 of 8

Severity, priority and the bug life cycle

is how badly a bug hurts the system. A crash or lost data is critical; an icon slightly out of line is minor. Priority is how soon the team should fix it.

That depends on the business impact, how many users are affected and when the release is due. Testers usually suggest the severity, and or team leads set the priority. The two often differ.

A typo in the company name on the home page is minor in severity but high in priority. Each bug then moves through a , a set of states such as new, triaged, in progress, fixed, ready for retest, closed or reopened. When a fix arrives, repeat the exact steps and take a quick look at nearby behaviour the fix could have changed.

Common trapmarking everything critical, which teaches the team to ignore your ratings.

A question to check yourself, an AI practice session and 2 cheat sheet entries come with the full roadmap. Unlock

Resources for this stage

Start with

GuideFree
ISTQB Certified Tester Foundation Level (CTFL) v4.0
ISTQB · Beginner
Chapter 4 of the free syllabus covers partitions, boundaries, decision tables and state transitions with worked examples

Practise

The Internet (practice site for test automation)
Small pages with dynamic content, broken images and tricky forms to explore and write bug reports on
Restful-booker
Deliberately buggy booking API; test it by hand in Postman and report what you find

Keep handy

Ministry of Testing
The largest testing community: free Club forum and articles on exploratory testing, charters and bug advocacy

Also worth your time

Bug Writing Guidelines (opens in a new tab)Read
A plain, proven checklist for titles, steps and expected results from one of the largest open bug trackers