IT Pain Scale

Inspired by medical PainScale

Comparative IT Pain Scale

#	Icon	Level	Name	Description
0				No pain. The system adds the intended value.
1		Minor Does not disturb the most relevant usecases. Ability to work around automatically or semiautomatically	Very Mild	Very light barely noticeable pain, like a log entry with a warning that does not effect operation. Most of the time you never think about the pain.
2			Discomforting	Minor pain, like having to click on a warning message and ignore it or fixing an entry manually to continue. Note that people react differently to this behavior of the system.
3			Tolerable	Very noticeable pain, like a login that has to be entered before each operation. The pain is not so strong that you cannot get used to it. Eventually, most of the time you don’t notice the pain. You have adapted to it.
4		Moderate Interferes with many usecases. Requires organizational changes but the system is still somewhat useful. Unable to ignore pain.	Distressing	Strong, deep pain, like a regular failure of a system function needing to restart the function and carefully avoid the circumstances leading to the issue. So strong you notice the pain all the time and cannot completely adapt.
5			Very Distressing	Strong, deep, piercing pain, such as a regular system outage.
6			Intense
7		Severe Unable to use system effectively. Relevant system functions have major quality defects. System needs to be fixed to continue to perform. Organizational activity is focussed on repair of the system instead of the user needs fullfiled by the usecases.	Very Intense
8			Utterly Horrible
9			Excruciating Unbearable
10			Showstopper	If the problem is not solved the system can not perform at all.