Uplifting QA Teams Through Metrics

Quality Assurance (QA) is an essential process for the Software Development Life Cycle with the intent to satisfy all the requirements to ensure enhanced customer experience. QA helps to improve quality and reduce costs by increasing efficiency and reducing defects. As software products and services are becoming more complex, it requires more comprehensive testing for identifying the defects and pursuing the necessary fixes before it becomes available for public release. The QA process needs to be planned out and monitored so that it can be successful. The most effective way to track the efficacy of QA activities is to use well-thought-through metrics.

Metrics are numbers that portray important information about a process under question. It can show the accurate measurements about how the process is functioning and provide a baseline for the suggested improvements. It can drive strategy and direction, provide measurable data and trends to the project team or executive decision-making. Metrics ensure project deliverables, quantify the risk factors, and pursue process improvements. It enables customer satisfaction with high quality products. Metrics also provide guidance for resource or budget estimation.

It is very important to identify the relation between the story, task, and subtask as well as defects. Creating and verifying defects will give you the trend on how well the feature was covered by the test cases and acceptance criteria. It is really trivial that the QA team verifies pre and post deployment so it is very easy to identify what was changed by new features and how much regression it might create.

Another very important aspect to look into is the Burndown Chart which is a graphical representation of work remaining vs time. At any time of the sprint one can get a sense of progress in the particular release. One can figure out the efficiency of sprint planning by looking into the committed vs completed. It will portray the percentage of story points completed by the team of the committed story points for the sprint. Team execution velocity is defined by the story points of work completed in a given sprint.