A reader, Stas Milev, sent me a question which may be interesting to readers of this blog:

Hi Rex

First, let me thank you for the huge effort you put in writing the books and educating people on various testing topics – the materials are just excellent. I have been a test manager for 7 years already and still find a lot of useful things.

Thanks very much, I’m glad they are useful to you. 

I hope you don’t mind if I ask you a question related to weighted failure metric you mentioned in your Advanced Test Manager book. You did not focus to much on this in your book and just mentioned it measures technical risk and the likelihood of finding problems.  As such, can you please expand a bit more on how to analyse this metric, the value and meaning of it?

The weighted failure can be calculated both on a per-test basis and a per-test suite basis.  (A test suite is a logical collection of test cases, such as a functional test suite, a performance test suite, etc.)  The weighted failure counts the number of bugs found (either by test or across all the tests in the test suite), but each bug report is weighted based on the priority and severity of the bug.  In other words, a test suite that finds a moderate number of high priority, high severity bugs will probably score higher than a test suite that finds a large number of low priority, low severity bugs.

Probably the best way to learn more about this metric is to download and experiment with an Excel test tracking spreadsheetwith weighted failure included.  Feel free to work with this one a bit, and I think the concept will make more sense.

Many thanks
Stas Milev
ISTQB Certified Advanced Test Manager

You’re welcome. I hope this is useful.

Tags: risk based testing, weighted failure

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 14th, 2012 at 7:59 AM by Rex Black and is filed under risk based testing, software test metrics, software testing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.