Given a list of items one can purchase (here the currency is engineering resources), given each one's cost and benefit (assuming each item is mostly independent

Given a list of items one can purchase (here the currency is engineering resources), given each one's cost and benefit (assuming each item is mostly independent), the optimal strategy is approximately to sort them in decreasing order of benefit/cost and work from the top of the list. In the terminology I use: Severity = total impact of the bug = (impact to each customer that experiences the bug) * (estimated rate at which customers experience the bug) Priority level = severity / cost, rounded to fit in one of n buckets