As part of Quality Assurance, various metrics and indicators of product quality and development process can and should be used. Metrics can be divided into groups according to the parameters on the basis of which they are calculated, according to the stages of the development life cycle at which they are applied, according to goals and tasks, according to the stakeholders for which they are intended. This list goes on and on.

In this article, we decided to collect together and consider the most basic, in our opinion, groups of criteria and metrics for the QA process. And in each group we will list only the most important and indicative, again in our opinion, metrics, as well as we will figure out why they are needed, in which situations they are helpful and how to use them.

What are metrics?

The metric itself in the context of software is a numerical expression of any property, quality of the product itself or the process of its development. In other words, this is what we can measure, compare and evaluate software with.

Now, just a couple of comments about the values ​​and properties of metrics:

The main goal of any metric is to improve the development process and the software product itself. The metric allows you to see at what point on the way to the goals we are at the moment, approaching them or moving away, reaching success criteria or not.

Metrics should not exist just for the measurement process itself. It is necessary to use only those metrics that really have practical value and will affect the further development of the product or the optimization of the process. From here comes a simple rule – first you need to identify areas for change / improvement, and then decide how to evaluate them.

Key metric groups for QA

It is theoretically possible to create your own characteristic, formula or indicator for almost every, even the most insignificant action, stage or status of the QA process. You can take into account each artifact, all transitions of defects by status, calculate the number of tests in the set. However, the most important question that you should immediately ask yourself when there is a desire to measure something is: “Why do we need this information, how can it be used?” By forming a set of metrics you should think of goals, plans for improving processes and a product.

So, in this article we will not consider the usual quantitative indicators of testing progress, which are used in most reports and statuses. Instead, we will analyze which parts, artifacts, and areas of development in terms of Quality Assurance we should measure and control to assess the quality of work. The analysis and optimization of these points is extremely important for effective interaction with stakeholders and software development in general:

1. Requirements for the developed software

Precisely we must understand what we are developing and testing, and the degree of this understanding we must be able to evaluate. Potential risks or missed problems at the specification level can lead to the most serious and expensive errors.

2. The quality of the developed product

It is obvious: it is necessary to be able to evaluate the quality of development and software in order to make forecasts and assess risks. It is important to understand how high-quality and reliable the product is, relying not only on the presence or absence of errors found, but just predicting whether there are many potential problems.

3. Features of the QA team

It is also simple here: in order to manage the testing process, plan work and predict the timing, it is always necessary to have not only the current status of tasks, but also know the capabilities of the QA team.

4. The quality of the testing team

In addition to the quality of the product itself, you need to measure the effectiveness of the QA process and the testing team. In order to constantly optimize and improve the quality of work, you need to know where we are now, which allows us to move forward and what moves us back.

5. Feedback and product satisfaction

The latter area, but, of course, not in importance, but in the opinion of the stakeholders of the process, consumers of our services, users of the product. It is very important to be able to measure the overall degree of satisfaction with the product, highlight trends and make appropriate conclusions. Properly selected metrics for this group will allow you to identify possible problems in time and quickly use a feedback to improve processes.

In our next article, we will consider exactly which metrics are included in each group, and analyze how they can be estimated. For each group, we will give some examples of possible metrics and describe their meaning.