How Efficient Is Our Team, or Our Outsourced Team?

How Efficient Is Our Team, or Our Outsourced Team? Together, the reports from the metrics warehouse answer the question of team effectiveness and efficiency. Specific patterns of problems are covered in Chapter 9, "Troubleshooting the Project," but here is a general guide to using the reports to answer this question. The Remaining Work report, as illustrated previously in Figure 4.4, shows you the cumulative flow of intended work through testing. The middle band, from Resolved to Closed, is the work in process of testing. If you see a relatively consistent width, as in Figure 4.4, then you know that you have a smooth flow. The smooth flow gives you a clear indication of the match of your resources to capacity. (This contrasts with the bottleneck shown in Figure 7.22, indicating a resource mismatch or problem with quality at the time of resolution.) Velocity (Figure 4.5) in the Resolved series drills into the details of the capacity and its variance. Requirements Test History (Figure 7.14) shows the progression of the testing against scenarios and QoS, while Quality Indicators (Figure 4.7) puts test results, bugs, and code coverage together. By putting these series together, you can make sure that the independent dimensions are progressing as expected. Of course, in judging testing, you need to look at upstream quality that is being passed into testing. The Build History report (Figure 9.11) shows the status of daily builds, which should be completing successfully and passing their BVTs with rare exceptions. Quality Indicators provides two series that should be watched togethercode churn, the indicator of how much new code needs to be tested, and code coverage, the measure of how much of it actually is being tested. Reactivations (Figure 4.9) are bugs that have been reopened after being resolved, that is, reported fixed. If these are high or rising, it's a clear indicator of upstream problems.