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I'm new to project management and trying to get a grasp on it. My latest challenge is bug reporting. I created a bug reporting form that contains standard questions:

  1. Summary
  2. Steps to Reproduce
  3. Expected Result vs Actual Result
  4. Screenshot
  5. Operating System
  6. Browser
  7. Urgency

In the urgency field, I have a ranking of 1-4 with 1 being the lowest priority and 4 being the highest. I also included definitions of each ranking to assist users in selecting the correct ranking. A co-worker of mine, who is in charge of sales and on the frontlines, wants a new priority about bugs that impact revenue. All the bugs that he reports are in this category. While important, some of them are not as urgent as his knee-jerk response to the situation.

My boss also doesn't want revenue listed as a ranking factor in the priority situation due to the concern that we will end up back in the situation that we are currently in where everything is crisis-urgent and we need to move resources/engineering to this bug when in reality it's not as urgent to push other revenue-generating new features aside.

Has anyone been in this situation? Do you have advice on how to handle this situation?

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  • You get what you measure. Make sure your metrics incentivize the organizational behaviors you want.
    – Todd A. Jacobs ♦
    Aug 22, 2019 at 17:49

1 Answer 1

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First of all, every customer facing bug has an impact on revenue. That impact can be big or it can be small, but the impact is there. With that in mind, I would recommend extending the criteria for the various urgency levels to include guidance on the possible revenue impact.
For example, bugs with a low revenue impact can fit in the lowest urgency class, while bugs that stop sales belong in the highest class.

Next to that, I would set a policy that the urgency specified by the bug submitter is no more than a suggestion. The final urgency will be set by a committee (consisting of representatives from project management and the developers/testers) based on their assessment of the bug's impact.
The reporters of bugs may have a skewed view on how important their issue is in the larger context of the project.

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