What are Software Testing Metrics?
Software testing metrics are numbers that show how effective and efficient a software testing process is.

Test metrics in software testing help you find answers to some of the your most pertinent testing questions, such as:

How long will the overall testing effort take?
What is the cost of testing?
How bad are the bugs?
How many bugs were fixed? How many reopened? How many are closed? How many deferred?
How many flaws did the testing team miss?
How much time will regression testing take?
Can the software updates be delivered on time?
Did we test enough? Was there room for more testing in this release?
Was coverage adequate with respect to effort?
What was the cost of testing?
Why are software testing metrics important to businesses?
There’s a famous saying that you can’t improve what you don’t measure.

Software testing metrics empower companies to track the progress, quality, and productivity of their testing teams. Further, they can be used to improve the testing process by setting a baseline to track and improve on over time.

With the help of well thought out QA metrics in software testing, organizations can

Better determine which testing enhancements and tools are needed to release bug-free software
Make better informed decisions regarding cost and time estimates
Pinpoint areas of weaknesses in their testing processes to improve upon.
Software Testing Metrics: The Fundamentals
Broadly speaking, QA metrics consist of absolute numbers and derivatives. Both of these metrics can be used to measure testing quality as well as product quality.

Absolute Numbers
Absolute, or whole numbers, provide a general, high-level view of the effectiveness of your testing processes. The data is shown in absolute units, so while it’s good to know, it has some limitations.

Here are some popular absolutely testing metrics

Total test duration: Refers to the time it takes to conduct tests. In general, teams should strive to make this number lower, and QA teams should run as many tests as possible during this duration.
Number of bugs found after release: Refers to the total number of defects or issues identified in the software after it has been released to end-users. A higher number of bugs found after release indicates that testing needs to be improved.
Derivative metrics
Absolute testing metrics simply aren’t enough to gauge how well your testing processes are working. For instance, they might tell you how many test cases you run in a day, but they won’t reveal your test coverage. To get a more holistic view of your testing processes, you need to consider derivative metrics.

Derivative metrics involve the use of formulas. By leveraging derivative metrics, you can get a better sense of what’s working, and not working, in your testing pipeline.

Test Efficiency is measured by derivative metrics. Here are some key derivative metrics regarding test efficiency:
Passed test cases coverage: Refers to the percentage of successful test cases. Past test cases percentage = (Number of passed test / Total number of tests executed) X 100
Percentage of fixed defects: This metric is used to identify the percentage of defects that are fixed.
Percentage of Fixed Defects = (Defects Fixed / Defects Reported) x 100
Percentage of total critical defects: This metric shows how many defects are deemed critical, out of all defects. Larger numbers indicate something to monitor.
Percentage of total critical defects = (Critical defects / Total defects reported) x 100
Percentage of total critical defects: This metric shows how many defects are deemed critical, out of all defects. Larger numbers indicate something to monitor.
Percentage of total critical defects = (Critical defects / Total defects reported) x 100
Defect containment efficiency: This metric is used to measure how effective your testing team is at finding bugs in the testing phase.
(Bugs found in testing phase) / (Total bugs found) X 100
Average time taken to rectify defects: Shows how long it takes your team to fix defects.
Average time = (Total time taken for bug fixes / Number of defects)
‍Test effort: These metrics provide a comparison between the actual effort put out by the testing team versus what was anticipated before the beginning of the testing process. This helps you set baselines with which the final test results will be compared to.
Number of test runs per time period = Number of tests run / Total Time
Test design efficiency = Number of tests designed / Total time
Bug find rate: This metric indicates how many bugs or defects the team discovered,
per hour Bug find rate = Total number of defects / Total number of test hours
‍Test effectiveness: This metric monitors the bug-finding ability of your team and the quality of your tests. The percentage shows how many of the total bugs found were caught by your testing team in the testing process. It helps answer the question of whether your team was focused on the right areas where bugs are likely to be found.
A higher test effectiveness number indicates better quality testing, which means you’ll have to spend less effort maintaining tests, in the long run.
Test coverage: This metric measures how much an application has been put through testing. Said another way, test coverage helps figure out if our test cases are doing a good job of testing the software code, and how much of the code is being tested when we run those tests.
Here are some derivative statistics that measure test coverage:
These are normally shown as a percentage value, and indicate how comprehensive your team’s testing was.
Test economics metrics: Testing is influenced by several factors including number of people participating, tools, resources, and infrastructure. Test economics metrics helps you understand how much you intend to spend in testing activities and how much you actually end up spending. This can be done by using:
Total projected costs of testing
Actual costs of testing
Variances from the budget estimate
Variances from the schedule
Average cost of a bug fix
‍Test team matrics: Using these metrics, you can easily determine how much work each member of the team is assigned. These metrics also help you understand if team members require clarifications regarding projects.
Number of defects returned per team member
Number of open bugs to be retested by each team member
Number of test cases allocated to each team member
Number of test cases executed by each team member
Defect density: Helps QA teams to determine the total number of defects found in a software during a specific period of time of operation or development. The team can determine whether the software is ready for release or whether additional testing is necessary by dividing the results by the size of that particular module.
What are the benefits of leveraging Software Testing Metrics?
Truly understanding software testing metrics and improving on them, helps organizations…

Improve overall testing process
Measure the overall quality of the test scenarios and cases.
Help you measure risk coverage>
Help in estimating testing cost
Highlight “hotspots” that need improvements
Manage the workloads
Reduce testing cycles
Improve software quality
Increase ROI
Better forecast when software will be released
Which test metrics improve when organizations switch from manual to automated testing?
Thousands of enterprises are embarking on test automation as it saves time and effort while reducing risk, when compared to manual testing.. To evaluate the effectiveness of automated testing, it’s crucial to have baseline metrics (from manual testing) that you can compare to. With the right metrics, you can determine whether your organization is getting an acceptable return on investment from test automation.

Here are some metrics that can quickly help you measure the success of test automation:

Read more: How to Save Money with Test Automation

Conclusion
To improve the quality of your testing, it’s vital that you understand your testing metrics.

Opkey helps organizations quickly understand their most important testing metrics-such as their test coverage-and is proven to help improve those metrics.