Comment 0 for bug 886

Malone currently includes a Severity field. In Bugzilla, this field lets the reporter of a bug suggest how important it will be to the programmer who ends up fixing it. In practice, however, some programmers like spending most of their time fixing obscure crasher bugs, while other programmers perfer fixing "trivial" UI embarrassments. And in Malone, the Severity field isn't present on the page for reporting a bug anyway. Therefore it exists mainly for the assignee to indicate how important the bug is for them personally -- but hang on, the programmer already has a Priority field for that! So there's no point in having Severity too.

In Bugzilla, the presence of the Severity field also causes fun but useless and time-wasting arguments between the commenters on a bug about how important a bug actually is, especially since the reporter of a bug is likely to overestimate its severity (e.g. if a quirk of their system leads them to encounter the bug much more often than everyone else). These arguments occur far less often for the Priority field, because that is understood as the programmer's business and no-one else's.

Severity + Priority as separate fields occurs in:
* Malone
* Bugzilla.

A single field is used in:
* FogBuz (Priority)
* Jira (Priority)
* Plone Collector (Importance).