Chapter 20. Measuring Your Success

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Using the Information in the Bug Tracking Database

• Metrics That You'll Use in Your Daily Testing

• Common Project-Level Metrics

In Chapter 19, "Reporting What You Find," you learned the basics of reporting the bugs you find and how a specialized bug database can be used to track them. Although most of your exposure to this database will be in entering bugs, the indirect benefit to using it is the ability to extract all sorts of useful and interesting data that can indicate the success (or failure) of the test effort and the project's progress.

By using the information in the bug-tracking database, you can perform queries that will tell you what types of bugs you're finding, what your bug find rate is, and how many of your bugs have been fixed. Your test manager or the project manager can see if any trends in the data show areas that may need more testing or whether the project is on track for its scheduled release date. The data is all there, it's just a matter of creating reports that will show the information you're after.

This chapter will introduce you to some of the popular queries and reports that you're likely to see as a software tester and give you examples of how they're used in a typical software project. Highlights of this chapter include

• What metrics and statistics can do for you

• Why caution needs to be exercised in data collecting and reporting

• How to use simple bug database queries and reports

• Some frequently used project-level measurements