> we use the JIRA field called ‘Severity’ to represent a (somewhat) objective assessment of a bug’s impact to the functionality of the system > crashing bug in

> we use the JIRA field called ‘Severity’ to represent a (somewhat) objective assessment of a bug’s impact to the functionality of the system > crashing bug in your bio screen The examples makes it clear that they use "severity" to map types of bug to severity level in a completely opaque way. Regardless of the impact of the bug, "crash" -> "high" and "typo" -> "low". A crash is high-severity even if it has low-impact in every category ("functionality of the system" included), but a typo is low-severity even if it is high-impact in an important category? Why? > a misplaced comma might seem like nothing worthy of emergent attention, but what if it completely re-purposes your brand statement This just sounds like a high-severity bug: it may be low "functionality of the system" severity, but it is high "brand identity/loyalty" severity. I think it becomes obvious that there is not much benefit of a special field for "functionality of the system" severity or even the underlying bug "type" that it seems to be representing. All severity is used here as a triage-heuristic anyways. Great. Now you can freely forget about it and find a better triage-heuristic for your QA team so that they can assign the priority more accurately.