I felt compelled to write the following article due to a division of opinion that has risen between several professionals within the quality assurance (QA) community and me on the importance of metrics in testing.
After 23 years in the QA industry, I concluded that measuring how efficient a team is in getting tasks done is crucial in driving cost calculations, team size allocations, future budget allocations and other important decisions. But many testing professionals see these factors as outgrowths of micromanagement rather than outcomes of output measurement. In fact, some voices in the testing community believe that putting productivity metrics around testing cases is useless altogether. In this piece, I’m going to dismantle this school of thought by debunking several myths aimed at discrediting the use of metrics in QA testing.