Goals Metrics

The Goals Metrics dashboard helps teams set and track test goals, offering visibility into testing progress and goal alignment. Use this dashboard to quantify test objectives, monitor trends, and proactively improve your quality engineering outcomes.

Goal tracking

Definition

Goals Metrics allow engineering teams to set structured, measurable test goals and track their progress across time. These goals can include targets like code coverage thresholds, number of flaky test resolutions, or percentage improvement in pass rate. Goals serve as benchmarks for quality and help teams align testing efforts with product delivery timelines.

Metric importance

• Team Alignment: Shared, visible goals promote accountability and alignment across QA, Dev, and Product teams, ensuring everyone is working toward the same testing objectives.
• Outcome-Driven QA: Instead of measuring only outputs (e.g., number of test cases), teams can now measure outcomes—such as improved stability or reduced test duration.
• Trend Visibility: Historical goal tracking offers insights into long-term QA improvements and team performance over time.

Potential bottlenecks and how to mitigate them

• Lack of Ownership: Assign clear owners or teams to each goal. Use labels or filters within the dashboard to organize by ownership.
• Overlapping or Conflicting Objectives: Ensure goals don’t contradict each other (e.g., increasing speed might reduce test depth). Prioritize goals based on release-critical outcomes and team bandwidth.
• Stale Goals: Review and update goals regularly. Retired or irrelevant goals should be archived to maintain dashboard clarity.

Goal types

• Test Case Growth: Measure how the test case repository evolves.
• Test Coverage Goals: Set targets for line or branch coverage or feature/module-level coverage.
• Execution Time Goals: Monitor the reduction in test execution time.
• Risk Area Test Expansion: Track testing efforts in high-risk or previously untested areas.

Visual indicators

Each goal includes a visual progress bar indicating the percentage of goal completion. Goals may also include:

• Status Tags: On Track, At Risk, Missed, or Achieved.
• Trend Arrows: Indicate whether the current progress trend is positive, negative, or stagnant.
• Time Remaining: Helps teams prioritize which goals need immediate focus.

Example use cases