Stop tracking vanity metrics. These are the QA measurements that improve release speed, defect prevention, and product reliability.
01Metrics that improve decisions
The most useful QA metric is defect escape rate — the percentage of bugs that reach production versus those caught in QA. A falling escape rate means your QA process is working.
Other high-signal metrics include mean time to detect (MTTD), test execution pass rate trends over time, and automation coverage of critical paths.
02Metrics to stop tracking
Total number of test cases written is a vanity metric. Teams optimise for the count rather than the value, producing bloated suites that slow CI/CD and require constant maintenance.
Similarly, bug count alone means nothing without context — a high bug count in early testing is healthy; in production it is a crisis.
03Building a metrics dashboard
MIISCO recommends a simple weekly QA health dashboard: defect escape rate, automation pass rate, average defect fix time, and critical path coverage percentage.
Four numbers. If all four are trending in the right direction, your QA is improving. If any degrades, you know exactly where to investigate.