What is risk analysis? What does it have to do with Severity and Priority?
Risk analysis is a method to determine how much risk is involved in something. In testing, it can be used to determine when to test something or whether to test something at all. Items with higher risk values should be tested early and often. Items with lower risk value can be tested later, or under some circumstances if time runs out, not at all. It can also be used with defects. Severity tells us how bad a defect is: “how much damage can it cause?”. Priority tells us how soon it is desired to fix the defect: “should we fix this and if so, by when?”. Companies usually use numeric values to calculate both values. The number of values will change from place to place. I assume a five-point scale but a three-point scale is commonly used. Using a defect as an example, Major would be Severity1 and Trivial would be Severity5. A Priority1 would imply that it needs to be fixed immediately and a Priority5 means that it can wait until everything else is done. You can add or multiply the two digi
