There are many different metrics that help drive team performance and creating quality products for the end user.  Knowing which tasks and projects and what their priority should be for the team can be fairly challenging, especially when having to weigh in on competing interests between management, product owners and your own team.  Data driven analytics help solve the riddle of what should be a priority.

Bug Escape

What: Bugs that get past Quality Assistance (QA) and into the wild are referred to as having escaped from the lower SDLC and made it into a production environment.  They are usually reported by the end user.

How: There are a couple of ways to track this metric, probably one of the easiest is to have a customer facing bug-reporting tool to handle intake reporting.  Then your team can assign a member to triage the bug intake from the customer facing system and convert them into a Work Item in your tracking system and tag it as customer reported.

Why: The team needs to understand the end user sentiment in regards to the real-world view of the quality of their product from the end user perspective.  A few customer-facing bugs that have escaped the testing cycle can have an immense impact on the reputation of your company and drive customers to competitors.  When a customer takes the time to report a bug, it’s usually because it has an immediate impact on their ability to use the software.  If you’re seeing a large number of bugs in production, its time to go back and review just how effective your QA and testing cycles are.