As part of a successful automated testing program it is important that goals and strategies are defined and then implemented. During implementation progress against these goals and strategies set out to be accomplished at the onset of the program needs to be continuously tracked and measured. This article discusses various types of automated and general testing metrics that can be used to measure and track progress.

Based on the outcome of these various metrics the defects remaining to be fixed in a testing cycle can be assessed; schedules can be adjusted accordingly or goals can be reduced. For example, if a feature is still left with too many high priority defects a decision can be made that the ship date is moved or that the system is shipped or even goes live without that specific feature.