Prioritization is black magic.
Understanding what is most important at any given time and mixing that with just the right amount of urgency is something that seemingly only triage nurses and minor deities can perform well.
And it’s not helping to provide options like this:
This is the priority scale of our current bug tracking software. The options are:
- Low
- Medium
- High
- Urgent
- Emergency
- Critical
Essentially, what you have here is a scarred system. The scars have been caused by bug reporters to whom everything is high priority. So rather than having a sensible low, medium, and high system, the tracking system designers tacked on 3 higher, even higher, and highest classifications.
The really humorous part comes in when you realize that “critical” is actually lower temperature than “emergency.”
Funny.