Priority Inflation
Early in my career, the team of which I was a member had a problem. As was (and still is) common practice, we were using a bug-tracking system in which each bug was allocated a numeric priority. Our priorities ranged from 1, which was appropriate for trivial bugs of limited severity and impact, to 4, for “drop everything” bugs that took precedence over everything else. So far, so good.
Unfortunately, we had so many bugs that the only ones that were guaranteed to get any attention were those with the highest priority. Of course, people soon worked out that if you didn’t give a bug the highest priority, there was very little point in reporting it at all. So, very rapidly we ended up with a database in which almost every bug ...
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