Improving metrics is one of the most frequently requested needs of our customers.  Management and project stakeholders need to have a clear picture of a projects health and any given time during its lifecycle and metrics provide that window.  These metrics however, mean very little to those attempting to interpret them if they are different for every project.  It sounds simple enough, right?  You would think so, but often projects within one organization end up capturing and evaluating different sets of data.  I encourage many of the QA teams that I work with standardize and simplify their metrics so that teams outside of QA know what to expect and how to interpret them.  Start with the basics- decide what you want to measure (are you evaluating the product or the process?) and determine how to quantify it.  Use this as a baseline for data collection for all of your projects. You will be setting company wide expectations for how quality is measured and eliminating any personal subjectivity. Standardized metrics will prove to be a valuable tool to compare projects against one another as well. 

What metrics do you collect?  Are they the same for all projects?  Do stakeholders know what them mean?

 -Colleen Voelschow