Categories:
CAT-1: Catastrophic. Major loss of functionality, possibly major data loss as well. Fix should be made ASAP.
- General Examples: Loss of data, users are unable to complete workflow(s), system outage
- Specific examples: Users cannot sign up for a course
CAT-2: Critical. These bugs should also be resolved in a tight time range, but are not absolutely critical. Functionality will be lost, and there may be perceived (but no actual) data loss. User experience may be significantly hampered for smaller segments of the platform. While not necessarily release-blocking, these bugs should be addressed within 2 weeks (e.g., the next sprint).
- Examples: Without relying on support, users can complete workflows, but they must use alternative methods; User-facing 500 errors
- Specific Examples:
- To advance to the next unit ("unit 7"), the 'next' button doesn't work (e.g, "next"), but using the next sequence link does work (e.g., specifically using "unit 7").
- A memory leak causes celery workers to fail once a week, but we have automation to detect and reboot the workers.
CAT-3: Major. These bugs include: serious but infrequent bugs, pervasive UX bugs, and bugs that hamper monitoring. They do not have the same time sensitivity as CAT-2 bugs. There is no timeline for a fix; a team should prioritize on a case-by-case basis.
CAT-4: Minor. These are less severe bugs. However, since many of them are simple, many of them will be great for someone learning platform development, or to pull in to bug-bashing sessions. We've started labeling good introductory bugs as "byte-sized": check them out! These bugs may never be fixed and that's OK. (In other words, if it should be fixed someday, then it should be CAT-3).
What this means for OpenEdX users:
While we all strive to make OpenEdX robust and bug-free, sometimes bugs do happen, even serious ones. We'll do our best to make CAT-1 and CAT-2 bug reports open source, and you can track which ones are open and what progress we've made on them here:
Before you make a release, check out that none of the CAT-1 bugs are present on your fork. If there are CAT-2s on your branch, either hold off until we fix it, or make sure you have a plan to releasing the necessary patch when it goes out. (Or you're welcome to submit your fix upstream 
)