Most of the times, managers are familiar with metrics or kpi’s as a measure of the team’s performance. These metrics will be around the speed with which testing teams can complete their work together with the quality of the software being tested. These metrics are what we call lagging metrics. They are easy to measure but difficult to influence. So say we want the testing team to finish the work in half the time. That is easy to measure. However, making it happen may require several layers of approval. The solution might be we either double our headcount and train them or plan for overtime work. But still, how do we influence that applying these solutions will get the job done?

I learned by experience that manipulating the lagging metrics is not always a sustainable solution both to the business and to the employees. We know for a fact that we cannot keep adding headcount nor render overtime work in order to respond to the rising volume of work and shrinking time allocation.

This is where I’d like to discuss about the leading metrics in software testing. Leading metrics is difficult to measure but easy to influence. And because leading metrics are easy to influence, we may apply several leading metrics so that our lagging metric will have a desirable outcome. For this case completing the testing activitiy in half the time may be solved by instilling discipline with the testers to start immediately when they receive their task. For the manager, its having the ability to assign the task to the right tester. Another approach is to understand what things take up the time of a tester in a day. From there, the things that take up the time of a tester away from the testing maybe eliminated, transferred, or reduced so that more time will be freed up for testing. Applying all these things may yield the goal of completing work jn half the time.