Defects

To ensure the quality of your product, your team needs to collect and analyze defect metrics. Tracking the number of defects detected and when the defects are found (during development or after delivery) helps you to determine which processes (if any) need to be improved. Important defect metrics include:

• Pre-Release/Build defects: Defects found before the product goes into production. Tracking the number of bugs found in functional or integration testing can help the team determine whether improvements need to be made in development processes, including code reviews or unit testing. If your team has automated testing, you may want to review your code coverage percentage. If the code coverage percentage is already high, improvements in the quality of the automated tests may be needed.

• Release defects: The number of defects found after the product has been released. This indicates the overall quality of your software code. Ideally, defects should be discovered before your product goes to market. Turnover in the development or testing team or pressure to meet customer commitments may be factors in the number of found defects. Large numbers of defects found in production merits a review of your team and their development and testing processes.