[Archived] Bug Categorization Guidelines

Categories:

CAT-1: Critical. Major loss of functionality, possibly major data loss as well. Fix should be made ASAP.

CAT-2: Severe: 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 not be around long.

CAT-3: These bugs include: user-facing 500 errors, serious but infrequent bugs, pervasive UX bugs, a11y bugs, and bugs that hamper monitoring. They do not have the same time sensitivity as CAT-2 bugs. We encourage open source community members to take a crack at these!

CAT-4: These are less severe bugs. However, since many of them are simple, many of them will be great for edX newbies to tackles, or to pull in to bug-bashing sessions. We've started labeling good introductory bugs as "byte-sized": check them out!

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 )