Performance measurement parameters for a tester

Software testing is not about finding bugs. It's about delivering great software. No customer ever said with a straight face, "Wow! You found and fixed 65,000 bugs—that must be really great software!" So, why do many currently use bug counts as a measurement tool? The answer is simple: Bugs are just so darn countable that they are practically irresistible.

They can be counted, tracked, and used for forecasting. And it is tempting to do numerical gymnastics with them, such as dividing them by KLOC (thousand lines of code), plotting their rate over time, or predicting their future rates. But all this ignores the complexities that underlie the bug count. Bugs are a useful barometer of your process, but they can't tell the whole story. They merely help you ask useful questions.
So What Should We Measure?

- How many staff hours are devoted to a project?
- How many bugs did your customer find?
- How many bugs did you prevent?
- How effectively did your tests cover the requirements and the code?
- Finally, a squishy but revealing metric: How many of your own people feel confident about the quality of the product?

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