This article highlights the best software quality metrics used to track and maintain software quality.
The software quality can be measured through various quality-related metrics that top software development teams maintain to ensure the quality of their product. A quality analyst can consider these parameters and can make them a part of their quality assurance strategy.
1. Categorizing bugs
The occurrence of bugs in the project and their count with time is an excellent indicator of the project’s stability and quality. The number of bugs increases in the middle of the project lifecycle and should eventually reduce before the deadline. The total number of bugs and their lifecycle should be tracked to check the quality of the software. Also, teams assign priority to the bugs to fix the critical bugs before the non-critical ones. If a project has a lot of P1, then it is not a stable project and needs more effort. The fewer priority bugs, such as P3 and P4, should also be tackled before time to improve the overall quality of software.
2. Change Failure Percentage
The type of acceleration performed on the bug defines priority, type of deployment performed. The failure rate of each deployment should be low to make it valuable. If the number keeps on increasing, then there is some problem in the DevOps process.
3. Request Quality
The high count or the increase of these metrics depicts the poor quality of the codebase. These metrics are:
· The number of times the pull request has taken place to break the build or frequency of the failed test suites.
· The number of merged and reject a pull request
· The number of comments on each pull request- It displays the number of team collaboration and the quality of the code that is pushed to production.
4. Test Coverage Ratio
It covers the ratio between code written for the piece of software that you are testing and the lines of code that are executed. The test coverage should be sufficient to ensure all the lines of code to be executed. Keeping track of the test coverage ratio helps in understanding the quality of the product and what kind of requirements the product is built-on.
5. Mean Time between Failures / Mean time to recover
Both metrics help in understanding the performance of the production environment. It helps in reducing any loss of data in case of software failure. If the ratio goes down with time, then it means developers are now understanding issues and resolving bugs to improve software stability.
6. SLA – Service Level Agreement
The service level agreement helps in defining the time limit to bugs. It helps in improving the quality of software and develops more stable software. It ensures the effectiveness of the product and the responsive team.
7. Defects
The number of defects found and resolved in time before the product delivery keeps track of the number of bugs and the quality of software.
8. Application Crash Rate (ACR)
It calculates the total number of times an application has crashed and how many times that has happened. It could be three to four scenarios that are used to calculate ACR.
Conclusion
This list of software quality parameters will help you in evaluating the quality and stability of the software under development or ready to be pushed for production.