The Practical Advantage Of The ICE Score As A Test Prioritization Framework

As a quick refresher, ICE stands for: 

• Impact: How impactful do I expect this test to be? 
• Confidence: How sure am I that this test will prove my hypothesis? 
• Ease: How easily can I get launch this test? 

Each of these criteria is graded from 1–10 and the average is presented as the ICE score.

ICE is sometimes criticized as being too subjective. The arguments are:

• if multiple people score an idea to test, they would all score it differently.
• the same idea might be scored differently by the same person at different times. This difference would then affect the final prioritization list.
• team members who wanted their tests prioritized could simply manipulate scores to get tests approved (though let’s face it, if you’re worried about this, you have bigger problems than the wrong tests being run).