My intention is to order them by impact of the fix on the rest of the system. Things that can be fixed in isolation are the lowest hanging fruit. So roughly in order of how I arranged the checks in the spreadsheet:
- Pure Fix (Optimisation or Tail Recursion or Docs)
- Runtime Exception
- Change to API Behaviour
- API Addition (Backwards Compatible)
- API Change (Breaking)
- Change to Language Semantics
But yes, you could play around with the order based on a number of other factors too.