In most cases development and testing cycles are out of sync with an average test cycle being around 25 days which is definitely not in alignment with today’s fast-paced agile development. The goal of having development and testing in sync is to maximize the efficiency by providing early feedback to the developers and to minimize the risk of failure when the application eventually goes into production.

Another factor making testing the bottleneck, is that tests are not aligned to business risks because so far testing teams have been focusing on the number of tests without considering the importance of the functionality they’re testing. this leads to an average 25% of risk coverage in current testing projects.

Despite having low risk coverage and very lengthy testing cycles, automation rates are considered to be around 40%. But in that case automation is not covering complex end-to-end tests, only easy ones and execution is slow.

In software projects, it is most important to measure the quality, cost and effectiveness of the project and the processes. To do that, test managers need to define the right metrics as they refine their testing best practices and adopt innovative new methods.

To measure the effectiveness and efficiency of the software testing project, Validata provides real-time, role-based dashboards with actionable, understandable KPIs and metrics that help your stakeholders gain understanding and make better decisions:

• Release Summary: enables end-to-end visibility and transparency into the overall project costs and variances for improved cost management and project profitability and provides the strategic metrics for organizations to make better decisions based on a complete picture of their project activities.
• Defect ‘Time to fix’: is the average time it takes someone to fix the registered defect based on historical data. This allows informed decisions to be made with regards to prioritisation and acceleration of fixes, resulting in the de-risking of the project.
• Risk Coverage: This is related to the percentage of the business risk that the tests cover. This is a very important metric as it helps to focus the efforts on the areas that have the biggest business risk.
• Automated root cause analysis: real time classification on ARCA (Automated root cause analysis) and AI- generated recommendations on Priority, Severity and ‘time to fix’. In doing so it results in faster routing of the defect to the right person or team for fixing. This helps to identify any regressions as soon as possible, accelerate development and drive higher quality and productivity for your projects.
• Defect Replay: the “defect replay” status report, shows the traffic and volume of defect transitions for a given period.