How to measure Quality?
Ministry of Testing
Last updated
Ministry of Testing
Last updated
Looking for ideas on how to measure quality? Some metrics that have worked in your experience and why?
Quality is subjective and therefore difficult to measure - what information are you, your team, the company actually after? Is it customer satisfaction? Is it a bugs found to fixed ratio? Is it all of the above combined with the team's throughput and velocity? What questions are in need of answers?
-- Anonymous
To the point above, it really is worth asking what is the problem you want to solve with these metrics. Is there some recurring issue you see on your team(s) or with your product. Do you have any customer feedback that may link to this? While we have do the classic things like NPS and customer feedback, for my QA team specifically, we track percentage of bugs that are fixed within the SLA for a given severity on said bug and see how that progresses over time as well as the health of our QA process to get a mean of how long and how much work each test we do is.
-- Ben Oconis
Instead of trying to measure quality, try assessing or evaluating it. By that I mean, ask people what they think of the product, what do they like or not like, what do they think customers will like or not like, what brings risk or benefit and, most of all, how does it make people feel? Quality is a qualitative social science. It can't be statistically analysed, it can only be described with thoughts and feelings. Try to capture these ideas of benefit, risk, likes, dislikes and feelings to evaluate them. Then you can make a combined decision whether the quality is sufficient enough for product release or not.
-- Benjaminogt-f
How to measure quality is a popular question. The answer I want to give is easy to say, but not so popular: “Stop! Quality can’t be measured, but it can be...
