Prioritizing Bugs in Agile Development
Learn how to prioritize bugs (P0, P1, P2, P3) in agile development, their impact on releases, and best practices for web and mobile applications.
When it comes to managing bug criticality levels (P0, P1, P2, P3) in agile development, it's essential to prioritize and handle them based on their impact on application functionality and user experience. Here's how each level should influence your mobile app or website release strategy:
💥 P0 - Blocking/Critical
Definition
These are critical bugs that must be addressed immediately as they block development, testing, or deployment, severely impact user experience, or pose serious security risks.
- Example: Application crashes on startup, or a major security flaw allows data breaches.
- Impact on release: Completely blocks release 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 like password reset doesn't work, or the application experiences major performance issues.
- Impact on release: These issues typically delay releases or updates until resolved to avoid negative user impact.
⏰ P2 - Medium Priority
Definition
Bugs that impact product functionality to a lesser extent, affecting less critical features or having reasonable workarounds.
- Example: UI 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.
📱 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 distributing these fixes may 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, based on their urgency and impact on users.
User Feedback
Hand in hand with our clients, we continuously gather 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, reducing 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 in deploying fixes or improvements quickly, sometimes even multiple times per day.
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.