In a nutshell: When managing test automation, five KPIs are particularly important: the percentage of test cases that can be automated, automation progress, test coverage, defect density, and the success rate. These metrics quantify the effectiveness of your QA efforts, accelerate time-to-market, and foster accountability within the team. This guide explains why you should track them and how to interpret them.
The 5 most important KPIs to track in test automation are:
- Test cases that can be automated
- Advances in Automation
- Test Coverage
- Defect Density
- Success Rate
Test automation brings efficiency and reliability to software testing, which is particularly important in today's Agile environment.
However, it’s not enough to simply run automated tests and incorporate them into your CI/CD pipelines. It’s also important to measure their effectiveness to ensure that test automation consistently adds value to your business!
There are several key performance indicators (KPIs) that can help you measure the success of your automated tests, and in this article, we’ll review the top 5 metrics to track in your test automation efforts to get the most out of your work.
Why do we need metrics for automated testing?
The main purpose of KPIs is to demonstrate the performance of the testing process.
When deciding which KPIs to measure, it’s important to ask yourself why you want to measure the quality of automation in the first place:
Quantified results
Building an automation suite to quickly deliver high-quality new features to customers requires time and resources.
KPIs can be used to track the effectiveness of automated testing over time, helping you achieve the goal of becoming exponentially more agile and realizing a quantifiable return on investment.
Faster time to market
If you want to speed up your time-to-market, you first need to know how fast you're moving!
KPIs can help speed up the testing process by highlighting areas that are not progressing as expected.
Hold Your QA Team Accountable in a Specific Way
Having a standard set of key performance indicators that are communicated consistently will allow you to hold your team accountable for issues in the various parts of the testing process.
Continuous Improvement
Continuous improvement should be a goal for every organization.
Ultimately, tracking the progress of your tests will help you make adjustments and overcome challenges as you improve your automation scripts and processes.
Test Automation – Top 5 Metrics to Track
1. Test cases that can be automated
Not everything can be automated!
A key feature of the testing strategy is to prioritize automation for the test cases that will provide the greatest return on investment.
This metric can help teams prioritize high-value areas for automation and identify areas that still require manual and exploratory testing.
*Breaking this metric down to cover specific components of your application can provide even greater value.
Percentage of automatable test cases = (number of automatable test cases / total number of test cases) * 100
"The 'Percentage of Test Cases That Can Be Automated' KPI helps teams new to automation who don't yet know how to measure their success. It also helps show stakeholders which high-value areas should be prioritized for automation." – Source: LogiGear
2. Advances in Automation
This KPI refers to the number of automated test cases that have been run at a given time.
It is used to track the progress of an organization's automated testing efforts over time and identify areas where additional automation is needed to improve testing efficiency.
For example, if your goal is to automate 100% of “automatable” test cases, this KPI can be used to track your progress toward that goal and identify any significant deviations during the testing process.
"Deviations" may include tasks that have been put on hold due to other priorities or unforeseen issues with the software, for example.
This metric can also be measured against the automation goal for a regression suite or a new feature to help you understand when progress is being made.
Automation Progress % = (number of actual automated test cases / number of test cases that can be automated) × 100
3. Test Coverage
Test coverage tracks the number of test cases executed and shows the percentage of test coverage achieved automatically versus manually.
By measuring this KPI, you can understand the extent to which your codebase is covered by all types of automation and identify the parts of the software that lack sufficient test coverage.
Automated test coverage percentage = (number of automated tests / total number of tests) * 100
4. Defect Density
Defect density measures the total number of bugs and errors discovered during a development cycle.
This KPI helps identify the weakest parts of the software that require more rigorous testing, and also reveals whether the development phase is encountering coding challenges that require additional resources or training.
Defect Density = (number of known defects / total system size) * 100
5. Success Rate
This metric, which represents the percentage of successful automated tests, is useful for understanding the stability and effectiveness of your automated test suite.
A low success rate means you’ll need to spend more time verifying failures. If the failures turn out to be false positives, this is an early indicator that your tests are unreliable.
If you see this number drop after running automated tests, it will serve as an indicator that your release contains more defects than usual.
Success rate (%) = (number of successful cases / number of test cases run) * 100
Automated Testing KPIs – Don't Lose Sight of the Big Picture
KPIs are very useful if they are aligned with your automation strategy, as they can guide your strategic decision-making.
However, don't get too fixated on achieving positive goals. When a metric becomes the goal, it ceases to be a measure!
Another thing to keep in mind is that while metrics are essential for tracking and understanding test automation, each one can paint an incomplete—and sometimes misleading—picture.
In short, this means it is extremely important to consider the context and analyze each KPI with a keen eye.
Mr Suricate Insights into Automated Testing KPIs
In conclusion, Mr Suricate ’s no-code automated testing tool Mr Suricate several metrics for measuring the performance of your tests.
Its intuitive user experience and clear reporting make it easy to identify the metrics to track in test automation.
FAQ
What KPIs should you track in test automation?
The five essentials: test cases that can be automated, automation progress, test coverage, defect density, and pass rate. Together, they measure the effectiveness and reliability of your testing strategy.
What is test coverage?
This is the percentage of functionality or code that your tests actually cover. The higher the coverage on critical paths, the more revenue you secure and the lower the risk of bugs in production.
Why Track Testing KPIs?
Because you can only manage what you measure. KPIs quantify results, accelerate time-to-market, empower the QA team, and drive continuous improvement.