Product quality relies on solid testing and validation steps. But how long do these steps take? Are the timings consistents or do issues have varying testing complexity? The Quality Assurance (QA) Time metric allows leaders and managers to answers those questions and monitor the pace and efficiency of the testing process.
What is the Issue QA Time Metric?
The QA Time metric calculates the average duration an issue remains in "In Testing"-like statuses (the list of statuses is configurable). Product teams are recommended to reduce and maintain the testing time through automation to keep a consistent throughput and make their delivery pipeline predictable.
Strategies to Reduce the Issue QA Time
Automate your regression testing
A high QA time usually indicates a lack of testing automation. The QA team is constantly busy redoing regression testing on a large set of functionalities whenever a new feature is pushed.
Ensure issues and components have clear boundaries<br>
If testing automation is not an option (yet) then it may be worth better isolating products and technical components so as to allow the QA team to only perform partial regression testing, which is much faster to perform.
Reduce the complexity of issues<br>
A high value may also indicate that issues are too large and complex to test. In this case it may be worth breaking down issues into smaller tasks that can be easily tested in isolation.