Measuring the efficiency of testing is a very debatable subject and testers have various approaches to it. For most of the QA teams, it is important to define what success means when it comes to their software testing efforts. It implies that majorly the responsibility would fall on the shoulders of the management or executives, but in modern QA teams, all stakeholders are
equally responsible for the successful delivery of a project. They measure success by using a particular set of metrics. Although there are no universal metrics, yet testers should set some for each project. So these metrics can be used to report the efficiency of testing. Metrics like the number of bugs reported or automated tests run or test cases written. A test case management software can also be helpful in checking if you have an effective testing strategy.
The Cost of Testing
Managers use this as a metric and determine this by the number of testers allocated to a project and the number of hours those testers have worked on that project.
Reusability of Tests
This may refer to testing documentation. For instance, if a team has created a summary for all the app’s components or a document with test cases – these can be reused to help new testers with a better understanding of the application. Reusability also refers to how well automated tests were written and how they can be reused.
Defect Resolution Time
It is important to track bugs when they are reported and if they are getting fixed in a reasonable time that meets the customer needs. Thus, defect resolution time is critical for severe bugs and the bugs that users easily come across and can cause harm to the application.
Percentage of Missed Bugs
There are certain defects that are not discovered and reported by the testing team. It there is a high number of issues that tester have missed and get into production being reported by the users, then the efficiency of the team is questionable. When it comes to missed bugs, testers can also use third-party apps that can also be used to isolate then.
Test Coverage
By placing the right test case management tools, QA testers can ensure that they have improved test coverage. Test coverage means how much an app has been tested. It is important to know in which situations testers cannot test everything exhaustively.
Time to Test
Another important metric to measure the efficiency of testing is to check the actual time it takes for a tester to test a new feature or bug-fix.
Test case management tools are one of the best solutions when QA teams want to measure the efficiency of their testing efforts. Although it is not possible to truly derive what testing processes have measured, yet it is possible to gauge the efforts that testers have put to ensure that an application is free from bugs.