Priority
Priority is how urgently a defect needs to be fixed, based on business impact and timing — distinct from severity, which measures how bad the defect's technical impact is. A cosmetic typo on the homepage right before a big launch can be high priority and low severity; a rare crash in a rarely-used admin tool can be the opposite.
Severity and priority get confused constantly because they usually move together — a severe bug is often urgent too. But they're independent axes, and the mismatches are exactly why both fields exist separately in a bug tracker.
Priority is typically set by product or engineering leads, not testers, because it depends on business context testers don't always have — an upcoming demo, a contractual SLA, a specific customer escalation. A tester reports severity based on technical impact; a triage process assigns priority based on everything else. Sorting a backlog by priority, not severity, is what actually determines what gets worked on next.
