Why Quality Assurance and Engineering?
A product goes through different stages of a release cycle, from development and testing to deployment, use, and constant evolution. Organizations often seek to hasten their long release cycle while maintaining product quality. Additionally, ensuring a superior and connected customer experience is one of the primary objectives for organizations. According to a PWC research report published in 2020, 1 in 3 customers is willing to leave a brand after one bad experience. This is where Quality Engineering comes in.
There is a need to swiftly identify risks, be it bugs, errors, and problems, that can impact the business or ruin the customer experience. Most of the time, organizations cannot cover the entire scope of their testing needs, and this is where they decide to invest in Quality Assurance outsourcing.
Developing a sound Quality Assurance (QA) strategy
Software products are currently being developed for a unified CX. To meet the ever-evolving customer expectations, applications are created to deliver a seamless experience on multiple devices on various platforms. Continuous testing across devices and browsers, as well as apt deployment of multi-platform products, are essential. These require domain expertise, complimenting infrastructure, and a sound QA strategy. According to a report published in 2020-2021, the budget proportion allocated for QA was approximately 22%.
Digital transformation has a massive impact on the time-to-market. Reduced cycle time for releasing multiple application versions by adopting Agile and DevOps principles has become imperative for providing a competitive edge. This has made automation an irreplaceable element in one’s QA strategy. With automation, a team can run tests for 16 additional hours (excluding the 8 hours of effort, on average, by a manual tester) a day, thus reducing the average cost of testing hours. In fact, as per studies, in 2020, approximately 44 percent of IT companies have automated half of their testing.
A thorough strategy provides transparency on delivery timelines and strong interactions between developers and the testing team that comprehensively covers every aspect of the testing pyramid, from robust unit tests and contracts to functional end-to-end tests.
Key performance metrics for QA
There are a lot of benefits to tracking performance metrics. QA performance metrics are essential for discarding inefficient strategies. The metrics also enable managers to track the progress of the QA team over time and make data-driven decisions.
Here are five metrics to track the performance of your Quality Assurance team and the efficiency of your Quality Assurance strategy.
1) Reduced risk build-on-build:
This metric is instrumental in ensuring a build’s stability over time by revealing the valid defects in builds. The goal is to decrease the number of risks impacting defects from one build compared to the next over the course of the QA project. However, this strategy, whilst keeping risk at the center of any release, aims to achieve the right levels of coverage across new and existing functionality.
If the QA team experiences a constant increase in risk impacting defects, it may be because of the following reasons:
To measure the effectiveness further, one should also note the mean time to detect and the mean time to repair a defect.
2) Automated tests:
Automation is instrumental in speeding up your release cycle while maintaining quality as it increases the depth, accuracy, and, more importantly, coverage of the test cases. According to a research report published in 2002, the earlier a defect is found, the more economical it is to fix, as it costs approximately five times more to fix a coding defect once the system is released.
With higher test coverage, an organization can find more defects before a release goes into production. Automation also significantly reduces the time to market by expediting the pace of development and testing. In fact, as per a 2020-2021 survey report, approximately 69% of the survey respondents stated reduced test cycle time to be a key benefit of automation.
To ensure that the QA team maintains productivity and efficiency levels, measuring the number of automation test cases and delivering new automation scripts is essential. The metric monitors the speed of test case delivery and identifies the programs needing further testing. We recommend analyzing your automation coverage by monitoring total test cases.
While measuring this metric, we recommend taking into account:
- Requirements coverage vs. automated test coverage
- Increased test coverage due to automation (for instance, multiple devices/browsers)
- Total test duration savings
3) Tracking the escaped bugs and classifying the severity of bugs:
Ideally, there should be no defects deployed into the production. However, despite best efforts, most of the time, bugs make it into production. To track this would involve the team establishing checks and balances and classifying the severity of the defects. The team can measure the overall impact by analyzing the bugs of high severity levels that made into production. This is one of the best overall metrics for evaluating the effectiveness of your QA processes. Customer-reported issues/defects may help identify specific ways to improve testing.
4) Analyzing the execution time of test cycles:
The QA teams should keep track of the time taken to execute a test. The primary aim of this metric is to record and verify the time taken to run a test for the first time compared to subsequent executions. This metric can be a useful one to identify automation candidates, thereby reducing the overall test cycle time. The team should identify tests that can be run concurrently to increase effectiveness.
5) Summary of active defects
This includes a team capturing information such as the names and descriptions of a defect. The team should keep a track/summary of verified, closed, and reopened defects over time. A low trajectory in the number of defects indicates a high quality of a product.
Be Agile and surge ahead in your business with Trigent’s QE services
Quality Assurance is essential in every product development, and applying the right QA metrics enables you to track your progress over time. Trigent’s quality engineering services empower organizations to increase customer adoption and reduce maintenance costs by delivering a superior-quality product that is release-ready.
