How to prioritize bugs in agile development?

When it comes to managing bug criticality levels (P0, P1, P2, P3) in agile development, it is essential to prioritize and handle them according to their impact on the functionality and user experience of the application. Here's how each level should influence the release strategy of your mobile application or website:

💥P0 - Blocking/Critical

Definition: These are critical bugs that must be addressed immediately, as they block development, testing, or deployment, heavily impact user experience, or pose serious security risks.

• Example: The application crashes at startup, or a major security flaw allows data breaches.
• Impact on release: Completely blocks publication until resolved. No updates or new versions should be deployed while a P0 issue is pending.

⛈️ P1 - High Priority

Definition: Significant issues that affect key functionalities but don't completely prevent the product from working; however, they prevent certain major features from functioning properly.

• Example: A functionality such as password reset doesn't work, or the application encounters major performance issues.
• Impact on release: These issues typically delay releases or updates until they are resolved, to avoid any negative impact on users.

⏰ P2 - Medium Priority

Definition: Bugs that impact product functionality to a lesser extent, affecting less critical features or having reasonable workarounds.

• Example: User interface glitches, intermittent failures in non-critical features.
• Impact on release: P2 level bugs are typically documented and scheduled for fixing in the regular release cycle, unless they deteriorate and affect more users or critical features.

💢 P3 - Low Priority

Definition: Minor bugs that have minimal impact on user experience, often related to interface aesthetics or issues causing little to no inconvenience.

• Example: Typos, minor UI issues.
• Impact on release: These are the least critical bugs and can be fixed in planned maintenance updates, allowing developers to focus on more urgent issues first.

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📱 Mobile Release Specifics:

• Immediate fixes: For P0 and sometimes P1 issues, immediate action is required, often in the form of hotfixes or patches. However, it's important to note that the distribution of these fixes can be delayed by store validation processes (App Store, Google Play, etc.), which typically takes 2-3 days before the application can be republished. To minimize the impact of these delays, we use tools like Sentry for real-time error monitoring and Uptimerobot for application availability tracking.
• Planned updates: P2 and P3 level issues can be grouped and fixed in planned updates, depending on their urgency and impact on users.
• User feedback: Hand in hand with our clients, we continuously collect user feedback to reassess the priority of existing bugs while considering primary business challenges.
• Quality assurance: Frequent testing is implemented from the start of the development cycle to identify bugs as early as possible, which helps reduce the number of high-priority issues at release time. By clearly defining criticality levels and understanding their impact on releases, our development team can better prioritize tasks, ensuring a smoother release process. By favoring regular iterations and frequent releases, we also lighten the ongoing workload and avoid the accumulation of major issues during development.

💡Notes: the case of web releases

Publishing web releases, unlike mobile applications, is almost immediate, as it doesn't require validation processes by stores like the App Store or Google Play. This allows for greater flexibility to deploy fixes or improvements quickly, sometimes even multiple times per day.  

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This agility is particularly useful for fixing high-priority bugs (P0 or P1) without waiting for the validation delays imposed by app stores. Additionally, continuous deployment tools facilitate regular web version updates, reducing wait times for users.

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