Defect Prioritization in the Software Industry: Challenges and Opportunities

Defect prioritization is a decision making process wherein stakeholders determine the temporal order of open defects to be fixed. It is critical to the software development lifecycle as the decisions made during this process directly affect release planning, resource management, and maintenance costs. In fact, defect prioritization is complex as many factors need to be taken into consideration and the decisions made can be subjective or incorporate inherent knowledge and intuition of decision makers. We believe that managing the complexities of the decision making process can provide valuable support and help in uncovering any inconsistencies in the interpretation of criteria to prioritize defects. In this paper, we explore the defect triaging process in Research In Motion to gain a better understanding of the shortcomings and challenges of the current practices. Based on our findings, we sketch some research directions to improve industrial software defect prioritization.