At Atlassian we place a high emphasis on transparency in our software and feedback from customers. That is why we rely on our public bug repository, a place where customers can report and track any known bugs in our products, and create new feature requests. When you report a bug, we ask you for a few details including its components, versions of the product it affects, and priority. However, based on feedback we’ve collected, we’ve made a few updates to further improve transparency about how we prioritise issues. Here are the updates we’ve made:
Priority ranking
Based on your feedback, we found that our Priority field did not accurately represent actual bug priority. Previously, that priority field represented single-customer severity – in other words, the severity of the bug for a single customer, regardless of how easy the bug is to exploit or the overall customer impact. But, since we prioritise our work based on overall customer impact, we needed to adjust that priority field.
In the updates we’ve made, the priority field now represents relative priority. Depending on the overall customer impact, we categorise bugs with one of the following priorities: Highest, High, Medium, or Low. Besides reducing confusion, this will allow us to transparently convey the true priority of issues.
Severity ranking
However, we didn’t want to lose track of the individual customer experience with a bug, so we have added a new field called Symptom Severity to represent the severity of the bug when it occurs. Each bug is categorised with one of the following severity ratings:
Critical – Crashes, data loss or corruption, severe memory leaks.
Major – Major loss of function, no workaround possible.
Minor – Minor loss of function, or other problem where easy workaround is present.
Here are the new updated fields you will see when reporting a bug:
Thank you!
As always, we appreciate your feedback on our products and your experience with them. We hope that these changes will make our triaging process a bit more transparent to you, and help to reduce confusion. As always, please let us know if you have concerns with the change or any further questions.