quantitative numbers in a world of qualitative feelings I am not against measurements in general, they can surely be useful. I use length when building things, weight for baking, time for appointments etc. I often use numbers for various things in my bug reports. But metrics are something different; metrics are measurement plus value. “Should […]
“Wouldn’t it be cool if we could come up with a Quality Value for our products?” said a colleague of mine. “Yes! That would be super!” me and a couple of colleagues answered. We had a lot of categories and data in our bug system; and perhaps most important was that we had a good data […]
A couple of weeks ago I had a discussion with someone that claimed that testers should (and could) report on quality. And especially he promoted the GQM-approach and how this could be designed to report the quality status. When I asked how that person defined quality, he pointed to ISO 9000:2000 which define quality as […]
Recently in Sweden there was a tragic death to a young child that could have been rescued if only the child had come to a hospital in time for a full exam. The one that was blamed for this death was the medical care hotline company that did not understand the severity of the illness […]
At www.context-driven-testing.com you can read “Metrics that are not valid are dangerous.” I believe this is true, but I would rather prefer “Metrics are dangerous.” Uninterpreted measurements are not bad by themselves, but when value is added to them, they become metrics, and dangerous because they state specific things without considering a lot of other things, that […]