Grade findings by severity instead of demanding every fix
Aliases: QA grading · severity · flat punch list · ship blocker
What it is
Walkthrough findings need severity triage, not a flat punch list that treats every sighting as a must-fix. Grading answers which items spend the hours left before ship. Task-blocking or irreversible harm is one band; hesitation that still completes the task is another; illustration drift that does not rewrite behavior is a third. Demanding every fix writes the three bands as one ticket.
Grading is not forgiveness. It rations remaining calendar. Without bands, a loud 1px gap and an irreversible wrong action compete for the same afternoon, and the loud one usually wins.
Why it happens
Hours before ship are a hard cap. A flat list spends that budget in notice order, and notice tracks visual salience: alignment, color, icons shout; error copy, a disabled control that still clicks, a secondary action stealing the primary path, wait until you reach that cell. Salience is not harm. Budget then pays for what is easy to see; high-harm items hiding in states slide past the cut.
Severity is a rationing rule, not rhetoric. Each band must bind a release consequence: blockers do not pass the cut; mid-band items enter this train or an explicit dated deferral; polish does not block unless it rewrites an intent sentence. A level with no consequence is a sticker, and the team will treat every sticker as must-fix again. Grades must also move down: unreproducible, density-specific, instantly undoable items drop out of blocker, or the scale inflates until everyone knows “P0 does not count”.
Where it stops holding
Regulated payments or health data may legally adopt “stop for every interface miss”; that is a product choice to treat all drift as harm, not a failure of the method. A one-person list that can be cleared in a day may not repay the ceremony of three bands, but it is still worth marking the single blocker so the day is not spent on an icon while error copy waits. Grades set only by the finder, with no second reader, drift toward “mine are all important”. Items that violate a legal accessibility floor are not polish the walkthrough may demote — a floor is not taste.
Applying it
- Force three bands on the log: blocker (task impossible or irreversible), friction (completable but one wrong step), polish (behavior unchanged). Ungraded items may not enter the tracker.
- Bind a ship consequence per band: blockers hold the cut; friction needs an owner on this train or a dated deferral; polish defaults to the next window.
- Spend ten minutes after the session on demotion: unreproducible, font-specific, instantly undoable items leave the blocker band.
- How to check: open this train’s blocker list. Pixel items that cannot change the task outcome, or a friction band demanded as “fix all before ship” with no deferral record, mean grading is not in force. Count polish items treated as ship blockers; any number above zero fails.