How Can You Manage What You Can’t See?

Metrics can be found everywhere but are they really showing you what you want/need to see? Take a look at the last defect metrics you put together or received. Does it look something like the image below?

If your metrics look like the one above the questions that comes to mind should be but not limited to:

• How can you manage what you can’t see?
• How do you know what the real quality of your product is?

The answers to both questions above are: YOU CAN’T MEASURE WHAT YOU CAN’T SEE. You might think you can by estimating or assuming but what if you’re off by 1,000 defects or 5,000 defects?

How can you start seeing the data you need?

• Implement data pulls from all the sources you need. Don’t pull data just to have data, pull the data you actually think will provide a valuable metric.
• Review the data pulls
• Correlate and aggregate the data so you can get valuable metrics. Don’t create metrics just to create them, create ones that you can turn into valuable measures.

How do you manage what you can’t see?