Collect Stats that impact our software business

James whittakar is a quite respectable name in the software testing world; I came across his article about agile testing, in this article, he emphasized on some valuable data.i am writting brief description of his point of view.

We used to compile different status report during our testing phases like, number of test cases executed, number of test cases failed or passes etc. theses status reports are quite important for QA managers or project managers, to decide various thing like release time etc but these status reports do not reflect the impact on business that we are facing due to bugs found during testing cycle.
So one type of data that would be of value is direct business impact statistics like:

1. Sales missed due to bugs,
2. Customer renewal rate and relative cost of defect
3. Defect Density
4. Containment

This type of information is like gold to decision-makers. Brief description of the defect density and containment is given below

Defect Density: Information that shows number of bugs in the context of the size of the particular project module or phase. For example, if a requirements spec for a particular project is 120 pages, and 52 defects were collected relating to this spec, then the Defect Density is 0.43/pg. Similarly, you can measure Defect Density per kilo line of code or per object or module design.

Containment: This measures the success of preventing errors from propagating. As we all know, the earlier a bug is identified, the lower the cost of fixing it. Measuring containment, therefore, can tell us where we can save money and time.

You can read the detailed article from http//utest.com