Software Testing Unleashed - QA, DevEx & Quality Engineering

Metrics: Asset or Trap? - Jani Grönman

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The KPI pairs that keep you honest.

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"If you cannot measure what you change, it's really hard to lead the change." - Jani Grönman

In this episode, I talk with Jani Grönman about KPIs for quality. We ask what to measure, and why. Jani shares pairs that keep teams honest. Test pass rate with escaped defects or flaky tests. Mean time to recovery with reopen rate. Lead time to production with customer impact. One team, one number. Keep it to three or four KPIs, own them, and act. We talk about agency at work and product sense. Your tests are not a scoreboard. They are a feedback loop. Bring product and engineering together, do root cause analysis. I left inspired to pick fewer numbers, tell stories, and ship with care.

Jani works as a Managing Partner at Hidden Trail, his mission being turning quality from a cost into competitive advantage.

Hidden Trail is a Digital Product Quality consultancy with clients in Scandinavia, Central Europe and the Americas. In Hidden Trail Jani leads advisory and transformation projects that tackle complex quality related development needs within his client companies. This means working with teams, management, product people, developers and testers to recognize where their product quality comes from and how to make it a tangible asset. Jani has 20+ years experience in software industry, during which he has worked with many teams in managerial, development and quality related roles. Jani firmly believes that quality means business!

Highlights:

  • Every KPI needs a counter metric: measuring mean time to resolve bugs without also tracking reopen rate invites teams to close tickets without actually fixing the underlying problem.
  • Teams should own no more than three or four KPIs at once, because a focused set drives direction while a long list produces noise and diffuses accountability.
  • A metric nobody acts on is a useless metric: ownership and periodic review are what separate a meaningful KPI from a number that decorates a dashboard.
  • Involving the team in building their own metrics creates genuine ownership, which is the difference between engineers who game a number and engineers who care about what it measures.
  • High unit test coverage can coexist with production defects, making escaped defect rate the necessary counterweight to any pass-rate or coverage percentage metric.
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    Software Testing Unleashed - QA, DevEx & Quality EngineeringBy Richard Seidl | Software Development & Testing Expert