Day1: Pre-Conference Tutorial
Thursday, September 20
The Business Value of Test Metrics
T Ashok - Founder & CEO, STAG Software
Using the GQM paradigm to develop a Product Testing Metrics Framework
J Veeraraghavan - Director, PMPower Consulting
T Ashok - Founder & CEO, STAG Software
The Business Value of Test Metrics
Measurements are factual data that enable us to glean vital information for rational decision making. When it comes to testing software, we collect a quite a few measurements that allow us to primarily evaluate the “quality” of software and help make the go/no-go release decision.
Today it is fairly commonplace to collect metrics related to defects, coverage, risk, estimation, variance, test cycles, density and test cases that are sharply focused on evaluating the quality of software to help in making good release decisions. In addition to these some metrics like escapes, productivity, ROI allow us to evaluate aspects related to the test process and also some initial measure of business value.
As the testing function/community matures, the test function needs to be aligned to the business and demonstrate contribution of the overall business. This implies assessing activities that go beyond release quality and process, like those related to profitability, business scalability etc. In this tutorial the focus is on understanding test related measurements from this larger context to evolve a metrics system based on customer, business, organization, division and product.
This tutorial will highlight measurements from this larger context of business to help you go beyond the typical realm of test measurements to enable you and your team to deliver a larger positive contribution to your business.
Author Biography
T.Ashok is the Founder and CEO of STAG Software Private Limited, a company that specializes in building clean software.
Passionate about excellence, his mission is to discover methods to build clean software. Enthusiastic about sharing knowledge, he conducts workshops and speaks in key forums.
He is an alumnus of IIT Chicago and Anna University with over 20 years of work experience.
J Veeraraghavan - Director, PMPower Consultin
Using the GQM Paradigm to build a Product Testing Metrics Framework
The GQM (Goal, Question. Metric) Paradigm is an approach developed by Victor Basili in the 1980s as a three level measurement model to arrive at metrics from business goals to drive decisions. Since then, GQM has proven to be an extremely effective approach to selecting and implementing metrics in many organizations. In a software product development environment, product testing plays a key role in ensuring that customers get a high quality product on time. To ensure that this goal is met, it is essential to measure the health of the product through the product development life cycle progressively and use the data from such measurements to make crucial decisions relating to the product release. Product test managers often have to answer several key questions relating to
- Progress and completeness of testing
- Efficacy of test processes used
- The quality and reliability of the product under test
- Balancing the risk of releasing the product with known quality with the risk of losing the market window, by delaying the release to improve quality
- The predicted reliability of the product in the field, and so on.
The tutorial introduces the participants first to the GQM Paradigm and subsequently helps them derive a metrics framework that they could use during the testing phase of the product development life cycle for determining the health of the product as well as its readiness for release. Through exercises and discussions, participants would get exposed to several examples of metrics that are used as part of the test metrics framework and as to how these are used to improve the quality of decisions made.
Author Biography
JV, with a Bachelors and Masters degree from IIT, Madras and industry experience spanning nearly 26 years, started as a software development engineer at Tata Burroughs Limited in 1981 and progressed through multiple responsibilities covering all aspects of software engineering and management.
During his 14-year experience with the Tatas, JV worked with several international clients such as Yamaha International, USA, Ford Australia and Burroughs Corporation, Pennsylvania. JV was responsible for taking various engineering locations of Tata Unisys to ISO 9001 certification. JV worked with Novell for more than 10 years from 1995 - initially as part of the senior management team responsible for Quality Assurance and Product Testing and subsequently as the Managing Director responsible for engineering and other operational aspects of Novell’s software development center at Bangalore. JV has built an extensive knowledge base in the areas of software engineering and project management and has significant exposure to software engineering methodologies, process definition, deployment and management.
JV has been involved as a Certified Senior Examiner for the JRD Tata Business Excellence award program in the past, and has also been an active member of the Bangalore SPIN movement for several years now. Recently, JV has been involved in helping several organizations in developing their Project Management Capability.
JV is also a visiting faculty at IIM, Bangalore in the areas of Product Engineering and Software Metrics.
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