IT Pain Scale

Inspired by medical Pain Scale

Comparative IT Pain Scale

#	Icon	Level	Name	Description
0			No pain	The system adds the intended value.
1		Minor	Very Mild	Very light barely noticeable pain, like a log entry with a warning that does not affect 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	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	Intense pain, like a critical bug that blocks multiple users frequently.
7		Severe	Very Intense	Very intense pain, such as consistent data corruption issues affecting a major part of system functionality.
8			Utterly Horrible	Horrible pain, such as system outages that halt all operations for extended periods.
9			Excruciating Unbearable	Unbearable pain, when the system's issues cause significant business losses or hazards.
10			Showstopper	Catastrophic, system-wide failure - no operation possible and no recovery in sight.