Question

I know that FogBugz help gives the following as a typical priorities scheme :

1. Life or death emergency... the roof is actually on fire. Drop everything and fix.
2. A customer is waiting for this
3. Very important
4. Important
5. Not so important - fix if time
6. Probably won't fix but worth remembering
7. Do not fix

...but I'm wondering how others have named these, especially any that are perhaps more concise? I can't imagine #1 actually being "Life or death emergency... the roof is actually on fire. Drop everything and fix." but maybe rather "Emergency." [?]

Answer 1

We renamed ours to simply be "1-Priority 1," which just means do this first, through "6-Priority 6," which means do this sixth if you have time. We renamed 7 as "7-Not Prioritized" so that new cases can come in with this priority so we can easily recognize which cases still need to be prioritized. We had fun with the names of the priorities for a little while ourselves, but this set of priorities seems to keep the most people happy here.

Answer 2

1. * DOA * HALP !
2. * BROKEN *
3. NEED asap
4. Want !
5. Think about it
6. ooh Shiny
7. Perhaps, perhaps

I'm just a solo dev so it pretty-much parallels my way of thinking, minus the unicorns.

Answer 3

My old place had a nice system:

1.  customer is down, no workaround
2.  customer id down, workaround available
3.  relatively more serious problem (e.g. coding error)
4.  relatively less serious problem (e.g. docs bug)