When I was at Totality, we treated an outage in our customers' content management system as a Sev 2 issue. It ranked right behind "Revenue Stopped" in priority. Content management is critical to the merchants, copy writers, and editors. Without it, they cannot do their jobs.

For some reason, we always treated dev environment or QA environment issues as a Sev 3 or 4, with the "when I get around to it" SLA. I've come to believe that was incorrect.

The development environment and the QA environment are the critical tools needed for developers to do their jobs. When an environment is broken, it means those people are less effective. They might even be idle.

Why would you treat the tools developers use as any less critical? And yet, I see one company after another with unreliable, broken, half-integrated QA environments. They've got bad data, unreliable items, and manual test setup.

If the any stage of the development pipeline is broken, that's exactly equivalent to the content pipeline being broken.

Development is production.

QA is production.

Your build pipeline is production.

Treat them accordingly!