Top 5 Metrics to Track in Software Testing

AlternateQA Team•July 7, 2026

You cannot improve what you cannot measure. Learn the essential QA metrics that every engineering manager should be tracking.

Measuring Quality

"Quality" can feel like a subjective concept, but in software engineering, it must be quantified. Tracking the right metrics helps teams understand if their QA efforts are actually working. Here are the top 5 metrics you should be tracking.

1. Requirements Traceability

Requirements Traceability ensures that every feature or requirement has corresponding test cases associated with it. Instead of blindly counting bugs, this metric guarantees that you are actually testing what the business needs. A high traceability percentage means your testing aligns perfectly with product goals.

2. Test Coverage

Test coverage measures how much of your source code is executed during automated testing. While 100% coverage is often a myth (and a waste of resources), tracking this metric ensures critical paths and business logic are fully verified.

3. Mean Time to Detect (MTTD)

How long does it take for your team to realize a bug exists in production? If your MTTD is measured in days, your monitoring and alerting systems need improvement.

4. Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR)

Once a bug is detected, how long does it take to fix it and deploy the patch? A low MTTR indicates a highly agile team with a robust CI/CD pipeline.

5. Automation Flakiness Rate

A flaky test is one that sometimes passes and sometimes fails without any changes to the code. If your flakiness rate is high, developers will stop trusting the test suite, rendering your automation efforts useless. Monitor and aggressively quarantine flaky tests.