Priority and Severity

What is a test strategy?Answer:A test strategy must address the risks and present a process that can reduce thoserisks.The two components of Test strategy are:a) Test Factor: The risk of issue that needs to be addressed as a part of the teststrategy. Factors that are to be addressed in testing a specific applicationsystem will form the test factor.b) Test phase: The phase of the systems development life cycle in which testingwill occur.]
Q. When to stop testing?
Answer:a) When all the requirements are adequately executed successfully through testcasesb) Bug reporting rate reaches a particular limitc) The test environment no more exists for conducting testingd) The scheduled time for testing is overe) The budget allocation for testing is over]
Q. Your company is about to roll out an E-Commerce application. It is notpossible to test the application on all types of browsers on all platforms andoperating systems. What steps would you take in the testing environment toreduce the business risks and commercial risks?Answer:Compatibility testing should be done on all browsers (IE, Netscape, Mozilla etc.)across all the operating systems (win 98/2K/NT/XP/ME/Unix etc.)]
Q. What’s the difference between priority and severity?
Answer:“Priority” is associated with scheduling, and “severity” is associated with standards.“Priority” means something is afforded or deserves prior attention; a precedenceestablished by order of importance (or urgency). “Severity” is the state or quality ofbeing severe; severe implies adherence to rigorous standards or high principles andoften suggests harshness; severe is marked by or requires strict adherence torigorous standards or high principles, e.g. a severe code of behavior. The wordspriority and severity do come up in bug tracking. A variety of commercial, problemtracking/management software tools are available. These tools, with the detailedinput of software test engineers, give the team complete information so developerscan understand the bug, get an idea of its ’severity’, reproduce it and fix it. The fixesare based on project ‘priorities’ and ’severity’ of bugs. The ’severity’ of a problem isdefined in accordance to the customer’s risk assessment and recorded in theirselected tracking tool. A buggy software can ’severely’ affect schedules, which, inturn can lead to a reassessment and renegotiation of ‘priorities’.]