Room
Room F1 - Track 1: Talks
Audience
Test Managers/engineers, Product Owners, Scrum master. Anyone who is interested in SW quality.
Key-Learnings
- How to numerically evaluate your software product quality
- Software quality points of view
- The general framework which can be used to evaluate any abstract unmeasurable problem
- How To Create a Dashboard everyone understands
Imagine you're a software company and someone tells you that the quality of your product is terrible. You might wonder how they arrived at that conclusion, and what criteria they used to make that judgement. Were they basing it on their personal opinion, or were they speaking on behalf of your customers? These are important questions to consider, but answering them isn't always easy.
Many articles on the internet discuss how to measure software quality, but few of them provide a definitive answer. Some say that software quality can't be measured at all, while others suggest that it can only be discussed subjectively. At our company, we were determined to find a way to numerically evaluate our product quality. We knew that there had to be a way to do it, even if the solution wasn't immediately obvious. We started by looking at well-known metrics from the ISTQB methodology, such as the number of test cases, defect density, and unit test code coverage. However, we quickly realized that these metrics alone couldn't tell us whether our product was good or bad.
So we decided to approach the problem from three different points of view: customer, development, and testing. For each point of view, we created a list of criteria that we could use to measure product quality. By using a multi-criteria approach, we were able to get a much better understanding of where we stood in terms of product quality. To make our indicators more accessible to everyone in the company, we created a dashboard using Google Data Studio. This allowed us to present our findings in a clear and transparent way.
One year later, we discovered the Google-based GSM framework, which gave us even more tools to measure and evaluate our product quality. With this framework, we were able to provide clear answers to management and stakeholders, and ensure that everyone was on the same page. Our journey was not an easy one, but we learned a lot along the way. We hope that by sharing our experience, we can help others who are struggling with similar challenges.