Every activity generates a number.The key to excellence in any activity is to find the relevant number and work towards being better at it. Sadly, most test teams focus on number of defects found and hence the huge defect numbers.
So, is measuring defects irrelevant for measuring individual's performance and should it not be counted at all for a teams effectiveness? It should be.Only that it should be tracked by the development team to gauge its effectiveness.The test team which accords undue importance to bug counts plays a limited role of improving the developers skill.
Is there a better test metric?
To answer this question , it is important to ponder about the importance of testing in during product engineering.To analyze this, let us answer the following question.
Why is testing done?
To find all bugs in the engineering phase
Therefore, any bug which was not found during the testing phase is a error in the testing process.So, it is important to track "Defect Escape" as the ultimate in test metric.
However, Defect Escape is a metric which is not useful for managers for the purpose of taking decisions on performance on the individual testers.In business terms, it is a "Lag Indicator".
The corresponding lead indicator for this metric would be the "Test Scenarios Executed".So the defect could have escaped only if there were no corresponding test case OR the test case was not executed.
Hence, for the purpose of Tester effectiveness, it is important to track the following parameters:
So, is measuring defects irrelevant for measuring individual's performance and should it not be counted at all for a teams effectiveness? It should be.Only that it should be tracked by the development team to gauge its effectiveness.The test team which accords undue importance to bug counts plays a limited role of improving the developers skill.
Is there a better test metric?
To answer this question , it is important to ponder about the importance of testing in during product engineering.To analyze this, let us answer the following question.
Why is testing done?
To find all bugs in the engineering phase
Therefore, any bug which was not found during the testing phase is a error in the testing process.So, it is important to track "Defect Escape" as the ultimate in test metric.
However, Defect Escape is a metric which is not useful for managers for the purpose of taking decisions on performance on the individual testers.In business terms, it is a "Lag Indicator".
The corresponding lead indicator for this metric would be the "Test Scenarios Executed".So the defect could have escaped only if there were no corresponding test case OR the test case was not executed.
Hence, for the purpose of Tester effectiveness, it is important to track the following parameters:
- Test coverage for Junior Testers.
- Test Cases/Scenarios Addition for Senior testers.
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