Jason Bryant shows how you can transform readily available raw data into visual information that improves the decision-making process with simple measures that yield power for both testing and development managers. A quality dashboard helps focus regression tests to cover turmoil risk, ensures issues are resolved before beta, identifies risks in the defect pool, and provides information to monitor the team’s adherence to standard processes. Creating, measuring, and monitoring release criteria are fundamental practices for ensuring consistent delivery of software products. Schlumberger has implemented a quality dashboard that helps them continuously gauge how projects are progressing against their quality release criteria (QRC). By using dashboard data, Schlumberger makes better decisions and subsequently is able to see how those decisions affect projects.

As testers, we focus our efforts on measuring the quality of our organization's products. We count defects and list them by severity; we compute defect density; we examine the changes in those metrics over time for trends, and we chart customer satisfaction. While these are important, Lee Copeland suggests that to reach a higher level of testing maturity, we must apply similar measurements to ourselves. He suggests you count the number of defects in your own test cases and the length of time needed to find and fix them; compute test coverage--the measure of how much of the software you have actually exercised under test conditions--and determine Defect Removal Effectiveness--the ratio of the number of defects you actually found divided by the total number you should have found. These and other metrics will help you evaluate and then improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your testing process.

Many of the misunderstandings within software development organizations can trace their roots to different interpretations of the role of testers. The terms quality control (QC), quality assurance (QA), and quality analysis are often used interchangeably. However, they are quite different and require different approaches and very different skill sets. Quality control is a measurement of the product at delivery compared to a benchmark standard, at which point the decision is made to ship or reject the product. Quality assurance is the systematic lifecycle effort to assure that a product meets expectations in all aspects of its development. It includes processes, procedures, guidelines, and tools that lead to quality in each phase. Quality analysis evaluates historical trends and assesses the future customer needs as well as trends in technology to provide guidance for future system development.

In a recent survey of 130 U.S. software testers and test managers, Randall Rice learned that 83 percent of the respondents have experienced burnout, 53 percent have experienced depression of some type, and 97 percent have experienced high levels of stress at some time during their software testing careers. Randall details the sources of these problems and the most common ways to deal with them-some healthy, some not. There are positive things testers and managers can do to reduce and relieve their stress without compromising team effectiveness. By understanding the proper role of testing inside your organization and building a personal support system, you can manage stress and avoid its destructive consequences. Randall identifies the stress factors you can personally alleviate and helps you deal with those stressors you can't change.