Organizations are increasing their spending on tools in quality engineering. Controls are shifting to technology. 73% of an organization’s spend is on automation for testing.
What’s your reporting and analytics yardstick to measure how it is helping in driving quality?
Historically software testing has been a space that has relied a lot on human due diligence to ensure quality.
Things have changed, complexity of the applications has increased, the race for delivery got intense, use of out of the box solutions with little customizations has increased. All of these things have led to an increased need to test more in less time. We moved to tools. Organizations invest in tools to cover their testing significantly.
The questions come down to:
Ground level questions:
Defect:
Are these tools able to find defects?
Tactical metrics:
(Defect counts found through human due diligence + Production defects) vs Defects found by automated tests by the tools.
Automation coverage:
Are the automation built on these tools able to keep up with rapidly changing applications?
Tactical metrics:
Percentage of tests running through human due diligence vs automation.
Effort efficiency:
What amount of human effort are you are spending on the tests that are automated for debugging, logging defects, retesting, test data creation, and more?
Note: If your efforts that are being spent on other aspects are high and you are only saving the time to run the test through automation, is it worth? The percentage of the human effort will have the answer for you.
Tactical metrics:
The average percentage of human effort spent on the lifecycle of a test identified by automation that ran into failure?
Outcome-based questions:
Testing cycle Efficiency:
What is the testing cycle time reduction you were able to achieve through the tools you have invested in?
Strategic metrics:
Testing cycle time efficiency per release. (Unitize the release size and compare on similar dimensions, leverage the fundamentals similar to unit economics)
Fund utilization Efficiency:
What is the cost-efficiency gain you can project through the introduction of technology?
Strategic metrics:
Total Cost of Quality Efficiency per release. (Can’t get any true efficiency picture if you calculate the fund utilization for people + technology separately)
There are several other underlying metrics your team may have to monitor on a daily metrics level, but at the C – level organizations need to focus on these to understand the spending of technology.
The question is, you have already started spending money on the tools, But:
These tools don’t provide you with a solution. So what are your options?
None of the above provides a solution because they don’t have all the underlying data sources and the data models to provide you with holistic metrics.
What are your options then?
You don’t have a choice from the market, you have a need.
Some organizations haven’t found their yardstick and are still spending money on technology hoping it will provide them with a positive outcome. They often end up finding after a couple of quarters that their investments didn’t provide the results they expected or changing tools or changing decision-makers or vendors to find an alternative.
The Yardstick problem persists and has a blind spot in the progress.
Some organizations build in-house tools, dashboards, and reports.
Depending on the nature of the organization, you might use deep technical solutions of full-stack applications or something as simple as Excel reports to build a solution.
Simple solutions are human effort intensive and the data quality is poor.
It’s just like presenting sales reports in Excel at modern-day board meetings. Ineffective and poor insight. Ineffective and inaccurate insights.
A few organizations who can afford to spend money on these things, build up a sophisticated solution for monitoring – often full-stack applications. They end up spending millions of dollars in building yardsticks and maintaining a whole number of heads to keep the system running.
It’s time to think differently. Yes, you can get a commercial solution and custom metrics without breaking the bank.
At Digy4 we have built our CXO Dashboard that keeps all these things in mind. So every organization across the industry irrespective of its size or QA spend can get the Yardstick set up.
All the Directors and C-level executives in an organization can remove their blind spots, and make data-oriented decisions and measure the success of their technology spending in quality.
To learn more about the CXO Dashboard feature with DigyDashboard (It is the best test automation reporting tool) and how Digy4 is reshaping the world of Test Reporting and Analytics in Quality engineering, book a meeting by emailing us at [email protected] or subscribe to our free trial of DigyDashboard at digy4.com