Bug Tracking, and “Severity”

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@apenwarr points out — in his epic treatise on scheduling, bug tracking, and triage — something that I’ve never quite managed to express well — the irrepressible weirdness of “Severity” in your favorite (!) bug-tracker.
I know what it supposedly means: there are definitions about how many end users it’s affecting, and how badly. Like, if there’s a typo in the menu bar of a major app, that’s definitely S0 because it affects a lot of people and it’s super embarrassing. Whereas a crash that affects 10 users out of a billion is maybe S4.
Which is all well and good, but isn’t that also what we mean by “Priority”? After all, “nobody ever sorts by severity; they sort by priority. Those could just as easily have been P0 and P4. What is a P4 bug with an S0 severity?
The bottom line here is, “just because your bug-tracker has drop-down, doesn’t mean you have to use it”. And yes, you know that. Someday, however, somebody — colleague, boss, wise-ass, whatever — is going to point out that you need to be able to sort by severity — and that’s when you need to have your arguments ready for.

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