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 precedence
established by order of importance (or urgency). “Severity” is the state or quality of

being severe; severe implies adherence to rigorous standards or high principles and

often suggests harshness; severe is marked by or requires strict adherence to
rigorous standards or high principles, e.g. a severe code of behavior. The words
priority and severity do come up in bug tracking. A variety of commercial, problemtracking/
management software tools are available. These tools, with the detailed
input of software test engineers, give the team complete information so developers
can understand the bug, get an idea of its ‘severity’, reproduce it and fix it. The fixes
are based on project ‘priorities’ and ‘severity’ of bugs. The ‘severity’ of a problem is

defined in accordance to the customer’s risk assessment and recorded in their
selected tracking tool. A buggy software can ‘severely’ affect schedules, which, in
turn can lead to a reassessment and renegotiation of ‘priorities’.

翻译：

问：优先级和严重性之间的区别是什么？

回答：“优先级”与计划有关，严重性与标准有关。“优先级”是指需要或值得优先注意的，按重要性（或紧迫性）建立的一种先后顺序。“严重性”指的是严重的状态或性质；严重性意味着坚持严格的标准或较高的原则，常常暗指严厉性。严重性的特征是需要严格遵守严格的标准或原则，如严格的行为准则。

优先级和严重性出现在缺陷追踪中，我们可以看到各种不同的商业、缺陷追踪或管理工具。有软件测试工程师详细的输入，这些工具能给予团队完整的信息，因此开发人员可以理解缺陷，知道缺陷的严重程度，重现并修复它。这些修复缺陷的工作就是基于项目缺陷的优先级和严重性。严重性指根据用户的风险评估进行定义，并记录在用户选择的缺陷跟踪工具上。一个软件漏洞会严重影响计划，反过来，计划改变也会导致优先级的重新定义和评估。