Classification of the risk or extra effort a defect is expected to bring into the project if the defect is not detected during inspection, e.g., minor, major, or critical defect. The rework effort saved by detecting a defect can be compared to the effort needed for inspection to determine part of the inspection benefit.

Biffl S.: "Evaluating defect estimation models with major defects", Journal of Software and Systems 65(1), pp13-29, 2003. [ACM DL]