One of the most important measures of system stability is how many not closed bugs exist at present moment. I will not speak about SLA here (or how quickly IT team is closing them) – this will be the subject of future post.
So, how to track number of open bugs and create some KPIs for them. First report we’re using – is Bug Rates standard TFS report, that shows on daily basis numbers of Active bugs, New or Reactivated bugs and Resolved bugs.
This report is used by my team for every week communications during team meetings.
Also we have everyday report that shows bugs distribution on statuses among developers.
It helps to monitor general state and to perform corrective actions if needed. E.g. if we see too many bugs on finished status, it’s time to clarify why they were not transferred to Tested status. Also we can see who is the main bug fixer today.
But we cannot use both this reports for KPI – they are for internal use, so they do not show goal we need to achieve and daily level is also not good for long term analysis.
So we have had to develop another report, which would give us possibility to set target amount of not closed bugs (they are called HD in the report) and to track average amounts of bugs for each month.
In the report we see matrix that shoes us two lines:
- HD Act Avg – average amount of not closed and not tested bugs for a month.
- HD Average – average amount of not closed bugs for a month.
The chart adds to these two numbers target amount of not closed bugs we must achieve each month. In out case we failed to achieve our goal due to several large project implementations in July and changes inside team. But we have KPI for bugs amount: we have goal needed to be achieved, and have chart that in one look shows us how we are dealing with it.