Here’s a simple metric for you: keep the number of open bug reports on zero.

Simple, eh? A yes or no – a completely binary metric. How wonderful.

After several projects that turned ugly after some time, because the number of open bug reports just rocketed to the sky I saw some general trends… general from those projects, of course, but maybe you can add your observations as comments to this blogpost so we can get some better, ahem, metrics on this.

In some contexts, what matters more than anything else to management is that you’ve “tested the requirements”. What does that mean? I’ve found that it usually depends on who’s asking you to test and how much they know about testing.

If your information objective for “testing the requirements” is to verify that the intended functionality seems to be implemented and “meets specifications” (a topic for another time…), then it’s fairly tempting to proclaim that you’ve tested the requirements after having done only a few black box checks for each of them.