Category: jira

Total 2 Posts

Atlassian Stimulus Package – Offer Expires April 24, 2009

I just got this in my inbox — quite a deal if you are looking to tryout JIRA or Confluence.

For this week only, we’re offering a special 5-user “starter” license of JIRA and Confluence for only $5 each. We’re calling it the Atlassian Stimulus Package and it’s our way of supporting small teams and small businesses in this difficult economic environment. Best of all, we’re going to donate every penny to charity, so please help us spread the word!

The Atlassian Foundation is donating all proceeds to Room to Read, a charity that helps the world’s future entrepreneurs by building libraries and schools for children in developing nations.

Get all the details at www.atlassian.com/starter. Hurry, offer ends on 24 April 2009.

 

Jira Priority (vs. Severity)

One of the first things I show a new tester is our bug tracking system (currently a modified Bugzilla – however, we are in the process of migrating to Jira). During this orientation, I discuss the difference between severity and priority. Severity is the subjective rating of how bad an issue is while priority is a decision of how quickly the bug should be addressed.

Bugzilla supports priority and severity out of the box. Jira does not support severity out of the box. My complaint is the default values supplied for the priority field:

Blocker – Blocks development and/or testing work, production could not run.

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 misspelt words or misaligned text

To me, these are clearly severities and not priorities. (To be fair, Jira makes it easy to customize the priorities.) It is also true that generally, the more severe an issue is the higher priority it will have. The counter example I usually use is what happens is the company name is misspelled on the product splash screen. This is a low severity issue. However, in most companies I have worked for, this is a high priority issue to fix (especially when a demo before the executives is scheduled…)