Software Testing Metrics Every Business Should Monitor

Modern business-critical website and app development is a succession of sprints requiring constant improvement. Software testing metrics allow businesses to measure each step to ensure product quality keeps improving. The key performance indicators (KPIs) a company tracks make up its metric testing strategy. 

The Importance of Software Testing Metrics

Customers demand faster, more efficient products with the latest functionality. To meet this demand, businesses rely on a systematic approach to their testing efforts.

Software development follows the trend of high-speed, continual development sustained with measurable quality controls. Many different metrics in software testing are available to developers. To succeed, businesses must identify and align their testing activities to their plans for long-term product enhancements.

The challenge for today’s businesses is to provide a seamless experience for active users. Customers must perceive apps and business-critical websites as feature-rich and free of performance defects. Companies can help their development and quality assurance teams meet this demand by prioritizing metric testing.

5 Software Testing Metrics To Track

Many different metrics for testing exist that cover every aspect of coding quality, software performance, and product scalability. Each metric you track should address specific parts of your product. 

Here you will learn which metrics you generally use in testing. You will see five of the top metrics you can use to develop a practical strategy for actively improving your current metric testing plan.

1. Defects Per Project: Tracking the Quality of Your Code

Tracking a project’s defects is the core component of quality assurance metrics. The distribution of defects identifies weak spots in the coding process and reveals problem areas you must address.

The demand of agile development requires you to precisely pinpoint defect sources. You determine to what extent defects affect each area of your project by subdividing it and tracking its weaknesses.

Quality assurance (QA) teams typically separate defects by feature, introduction, and type. Depending on the specific development pipeline and goals for the project, you may further divide defects by priority and severity.

Often, understanding what caused a fault is as crucial as fixing it. Product quality often equates with getting to the source of defects so you can eliminate them on a large scale. 

2. Test Coverage: Ensuring Comprehensive Testing

The highly competitive nature of the current development environment necessitates tracking all metric measures. However, assessing all parameters is rarely feasible.

Development and QA teams must consider what they need to evaluate to ensure complete coverage. For example, budget allocations often limit testing. So it helps to understand what it will cost to perform each test. Additionally, to get an accurate picture of how testing affects product success, you should also analyze how much not performing specific tests will cost the organization.

Businesses must make informed decisions about where to put funds available for testing. Of course, it is impossible to achieve total coverage, but careful analysis of what tests you must perform helps you prioritize where to invest the most time and resources. 

To this end, Ranorex DesignWise can help you gain maximum testing efficiency. The versatile and powerful testing system tool reveals areas in your code requiring more testing, allowing your development and QA teams to ensure a comprehensive analysis. 

3. Defect Removal Efficiency: Improving Efficiency in Bug Resolution

Defining specific tests for finding defects is a never-ending process. Moreover, as software product requirements evolve, coding changes tend to decrease tests’ efficiency in bug removal.

To keep up with how effective software testing quality metrics are at finding and removing bugs, QA teams often track how each test compares to the overall efficiency of bug removal across the entire project.

Teams must continuously measure and evaluate software testing quality metrics to determine which tests to improve and which to remove.

Keeping up with how changes to the software affect defect testing efficiency helps your teams accurately decide which coding projects to prioritize. 

4. Test Efficiency: Streamlining Your Testing Process

You can use derivative measures to make your testing process scalable. For example, measuring samples of test efficiency provides QA teams with enough information to plan a product testing strategy across the potential market segment.

Measuring the efficiency of each test against the efficiency of the entire project gives you an accurate picture of individual tests’ operational effectiveness. However, recording test efficiency requires you to track test degradation on a sliding scale over a specific time period. Consequently, the workload can become enormous.

You can only go so far with manual testing. In addition, to keep up with the speed of agile development standards, it’s imperative that companies automate portions of their testing processes.

Automation carries the added advantage of built-in metric reporting capabilities. As a result, development teams can use available data to focus their resources on areas of inefficiency. 

5. Customer Satisfaction Metrics: Ensuring User Needs are Met

Every successful company strives to mitigate customer churn and increase customer lifetime. From the QA side of software development, retaining customers means consistently exceeding their performance requirements.

High-performance apps and websites require coding that eliminates bottlenecks and increases response time. Performing unit tests will reduce what you are testing to the smallest possible code fragment. Your development and QA teams can compare each result with the system’s average time to accomplish each measured task. It would help if you also tracked how the average revenue of each change to the software compares to the cost of meeting continually updating requirements. 

In addition, customer satisfaction metrics help you spot trends early. They will also help you to understand what features attract your customers. The organization can then effectively pour more effort into explicitly meeting the needs of its users.

Maximize Your Software Quality With Effective Testing Metrics

As you craft a testing strategy for your product app or website, consider the right automation tools to help free up time and resources. 

Ranorex Studio can help you build robust tests that measure your product’s effectiveness and continual quality improvement. Your tests will also include issue tracking and reporting, keeping your development on track.

Our tools support your efforts to retain customers as you develop, build and enhance your products. In addition, our time-saving tools enable your teams to focus on strategy development for long-term growth instead of being bogged down with busy work. 

Try a free Ranorex Studio demo and discover a tool suite to streamline your software development and testing processes.