Open Bugs Over Time by Priority

Owned by Natallia_Mendzel@epam.com
Last updated: Aug 01, 2022 by Anastasia Baranouskaya
3 min read

Purpose

Open Bugs Over Time by Priority shows a number of open bugs by priority over time (default calculation depth - 1 year).

How metric helps

Open Bugs Over Time by Priority reveals trends in the amount of open bugs over time. The following questions may get answered with the help of the metric:

  • How many bugs is the team reporting?

  • What is the overall trend in the number of open bugs?

  • Is there a rise/fall in the number of bugs comparing to delivery milestones?

  • Shows how many issues by priority is still in backlog, i.e. exist in the product

  • Shows quality of a product

  • Shows effectiveness of test strategy

  • Shows how team reacts to high priority issues by resolving them in timely manner

  • Shows historical data of bug growth trend over time

  • Shows how whether quality debt is reducing or growing

How metric works

Chart overview

Chart displays the number of open bugs (Y axis) over time of day-by-day granularity (X axis). Each line presents defects of a particular priority.

Priorities are taken "as is" from the defect tracking system, i.e. for different projects these priorities may be different on a chart.

Chart legend displays last calculated metric values.

By hover over a series a hint appears showing a number of opened defects of a selected priority at a particular date.

In case if need see a total number of defects - another variation of this chart can help - Open Bugs Over Time:

Top problems metric identifies

  1. Team misbalance (skills ratio)

  2. Technical and Quality Debt is out of control

    1. No pre-commit validation and local testing by devs 

    2. No focus on quality of software, i.e. issues got ignored in favor to new feature development 

    3. No EngX practices in place, e.g. unit or integrations tests are not done by devs ()

  3. Quality debt is not burning out as there is no team's capacity

  • Test strategy is not efficient (e.g. when there are too many low priority issues logged)

  • Issues are being logged by any separate team (e.g. L3), but not taken into attention of development team, i.e. no visibility on entire issues backlog

  • Requirements are of poor quality to be properly comprehended by development team

  • Issues are not reproducible / not consistent or contain not enough detail for debugging, absence of monitoring and logging 

  • No specific skills or resources in the team to address particular issues

  • No balance between QA & Dev resources 

Calculation

Open Bugs Over Time is a number of defects (of particular priority, if a metric is viewed by priorities) in any other state rather than "DONE" bucket in Perf workflows. This is taken from Project Settings > Data Sources > Task Tracking system (e.g. JIRA).

RAG thresholds: n/a.

Data Source

Data for the metric can be collected from a task tracking system (Jira, TFS, Rally, etc.).