Chapter 5: Fundamental Metrics for Software Testing

Overview

Would you hire a carpenter who did not have and would not use a tape measure? Probably not, because the carpenter who does not use a tape measure probably will not deliver a satisfactory job. Most people recognize readily that measuring tools are necessary to make sure that a structure is laid out according to the plan, that the floors are level and the walls plumb. Yet we buy software to do important work that has been developed and validated by people who do not use any type of measurement. In this chapter, we define the fundamental metrics that will be used in the methods described in the next chapters.

The following are some typical software testing questions that require measurement to answer:

  • How big is it?

    • How long will it take to test it?

    • How much will it cost to test it?

  • What about the bugs?

    • How bad were they? What type were they?

    • What kind of bugs were found?

    • How many of the bugs that were found were fixed?

    • How many new bugs did the users find?

  • How much of it has to be tested?

  • Will it be ready on time?

  • How good were the tests?

  • How much did it cost to test it?

  • Was the test effort adequate? Was it worth it?

  • How did it perform?

Good answers to these questions require measurement. If testers don't have good answers to these questions, it is not because there are no applicable metrics; it's because they are not measuring.

In this chapter, we discuss the metrics available to answer each of these questions, both fundamental and derived. The techniques used to give you good answers to questions like "How big is it?" are presented throughout the rest of this book; all of these techniques require measurement. In this chapter, I introduce the units and metrics used by these techniques.



Software Testing Fundamentals
Software Testing Fundamentals: Methods and Metrics
ISBN: 047143020X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 132

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