12 KPIs to Improve the Quality of Your Software Delivery

The mad rush to deliver software faster is a major threat for an organization's quality control and brand integrity. QA and test teams are under pressure like never before to ensure that software products are always functional, reliable and delivering value to end users. If it goes wrong, you can bet your bottom dollar that test managers and their team will be first in the firing line from up high.

The velocity and volume of work isn't the only issue, either. It's how the work flows. A software delivery value stream comprises multiple stages underpinned by a network of teams, tools, and processes. All these touch points and routes that can disrupt and contaminate the flow and damage a product's quality. Proper orchestration of this network and how work flows across the value stream is key to creating an effective end-to-end testing infrastructure.

As Matt Angerer, our pre-sales architect explains in his article for SD Times, more testers and automation isn't the answer. Sure, test automation is a critical component to your overall testing strategy, along with having the right team of QA Analysts and Testers. But focusing on adding more testers to increase coverage, or automating just for the sake of automating can create unnecessary overheads in your value stream.

To remain lean, Agile, and adaptable, you need to closely examine and measure your data points. "The answer," he writes, "is in the data." Matt goes on to propose 12 KPIs to track that can help you unlock the full potential of your QA organization:

1. Active defects
2. Authored tests
3. Automated tests
4. Covered requirements
5. Defects fixed per day
6. Passed requirements
7. Passed tests
8. Rejected defects
9. Reviewed requirements
10. Severe defects
11. Test instances executed
12. Tests executed

By understanding the indicators of quality, you can better position your people, adjust your processes, and decide whether you have the right enabling technology in place to improve upon quality while accelerating velocity. Most organizations will make adjustments before closely examining and measuring these KPIs over the course of time. The key is to understand and document the trends that occur within teams, within projects, and within products. By understanding and documenting QA trends, a QA Leader is better able to pivot his/her team accordingly deliver in lock-step with the rest of the IT organization.

How Value Stream Integration improves Quality Management

In many organizations, it's up to the testing and QA teams to declare whether an application is ready to ship and deliver value to the customer. In order to make that critical decision, they need real-time information from across the toolchain to access the health of a product. Value Stream Integration helps flow that critical information across tools to improve Quality Management.