Now it's time to prioritize. The first thing to do is to look at which issues affect the largest number of developers the most severely. Those are high priority issues. Usually this part of prioritization is done by somebody who has a broad view over developers in the team or company. Often, this is a manager.
That said, sometimes issues have an order that they should be resolved in that is not directly related to their severity. For example, Issue X has to be resolved before Issue Y can be resolved, or resolving Issue A would make resolving Issue B easier.
This means that Issue A and Issue X should be fixed first even if they're not as severe as the issues that they block. Often, there's a chain of issues like this and the trick is to find the issue at the bottom of the stack.
Handling this part of prioritization incorrectly is one of the most common and major mistakes in software design. It may seem like a minor detail, but in fact it is critical to the success of...