Summary

The individual and project-level metrics presented here are by no means the definitive list. They're merely examples of common metrics used to track and measure software projects. Each project team, test manager, and tester will use the ones that tell them the information they want to know about the software they're developing. To some people, tracking the average bug severity may be important. To others, it may be how quickly bugs are resolved. You may want to know how many bugs you find per day or what your open-to-fix ratio is. The goal of using metrics is to measure your success and your project's success, to know whether everything is running according to plan, and if it's not, what might be done to correct it.

Chapter 21, "Software Quality Assurance," will introduce you to the next evolutionary step, beyond software testing, where metrics are used not just to measure and correct a specific project, but also to improve the overall development process.