Severity is something which comes from the testers/end 
users, which inturn depends upon the impact of particular 
issue on the functionality of the project.

Priority is something, for which Developement is 
accountable for,in which the importance to fix the issue is 
decided considering lot of factors.

             Rohith  DELL R&D Centre.

hi friends this tulasi ravi,

Severity means impact of the bug on the functionality of an 
application.testers give Severity level

priority: it was assigned by Project Manager to devlopers. 
how soon developers has to fix the bug.

2)suppose client logo or spell mistakes will treated as 
priority at the time of presentation, but it may have low 
severity on the functionlities.
3)high priority will fix first but in real scenario both 
has to fix with in 24 - 48 hrs depends on sitution.

plz give me rank so that i can estimate my reply

seviroty

Degree of impact on a system when issue occur.
Given by tester

Priority

Degree of urgency in which the corrective action should be 
taken.
given by developer

Severity means the impact of a bug on that particular
application.
we have many types severity status in which we can decide
which state a bug can be -- Critical, Major , Minor , Show
Stopper, Trivial etc.

Priority - It is the importance of that bug to be fixed at
the  earliest.

Status Includes - High, Medium ,Low.
In technical terms you can quote it as P0,P1,P2.

 1.) For Your first questions many companies will not follow
the same process so itz difficult to say at this point who
would decide the priority / Severity as on whole few
companies follow this way Severity is decided by tester and
the priority is decided by PM / TestLead / Test Manager.

2.)See for this question the answer is very simple ..If
client is compelling you by saying that it is a High
important issue at that instance as a tester all u have to
do is go and analyse all type of doc's like BRD'S, PCR'S etc
and try to find out if that is a really an high important
one.If u feel that client was wrong with his concept then u
can mail him or talk to him and send all the relevant doc's
 
It could happen the second way too.. when a client says it a
high important issue than it's their priority as he need's
to be fix the issue at the earliest as it is related to
business so priority may be given by client time to time. So
u can't contradict or deny him, after all he is a client.

3.) For Your third question see you can judge it by just
knowing which one is more important to client i.e. which one
would be fixed earlier and which one little later, it all
depends upon the time constraint and the applications
constraint too.


If u have any other queries apart from this do not hesitate
to ctt me You can reach me at my Personal email
blazinrock@yahoo.co.in,coolshravan4u@yahoo.co.in

hi shavan kumar,

 ur answer is excellent,if anyone give the answer this way 
interviewer will not get a chance to ask further question 
on this topic...

Priority is how important is the issue at a perticular 
point/duration of time
E.g: Fixing of a bug in balance sheet during year end
Development of a division wise performance report for 
chairman of the company
completion of go live critical developments
In most of the cases the priority is defined by the users 
or the PM, delivery manager ...
priority may be very high, high, medium and low

Severity is the extent/degree of impact of a problem on the 
system/program or other functionalities of the business
Generally defined by the Functional , technical, QA & 
testers after conducting a through impact analysis
Severity may be critical (show stopper),major and minor.
E.g: incomplete testing (positive and negative) of the 
individual developments is highly severe as they may have 
high impact on other functionalities while conducting 
integration testing

Priority is associated with an incident and severity is 
associated with a problem

Production server down or network failure is both high 
priority and high severity as business will stop 
functioning and there may be huge financial loss incurred.

Answer to Q-2: Analyze the program to find out the impact 
that it will have on the daily transactions and the user 
base that will get effected by that. Discuss with the team 
and PM and according take the decission.if impact is high 
and the risk is high in near future then go and fix it else 
convey the message to the client by giving the effort 
estimation.

Answer-3: In both the case analyze due to which the the 
business process is getting effected highly and for what 
duration and then take the call accordingly. All depends on 
the type of issue.