What is the impact if the bug were to surface in the customer environment?
The impact of some bugs is self-evident. For example,” entire system crashes when I hit the enter key.” Some bugs are not so obvious. For example, you may discover a typo on a window. This may seem very minor, even trivial unless you point out that every time someone uses your product this is the first thing they see and the typo results in an offensive word. In this case, even though it is just a typo it may be something thatabsolutely must be fixed prior to shipping the product. Make your best judgment. If you think it is possible that this defect will not get sufficient priority then state the potential impact and sell the defect. Don’t oversell, but make sure the readers of the defect have an accurate understanding of the probable impact on the customer.
