QA / Tester OKR Examples

Quality assurance in Engineering involves software design, writing source code, control of source code, reviewing code, configuration management, change management, program testing, software integration and release management process.

For any company, a passionate tester is more important than an experienced developer. A tester whether working in an individual capacity or in a team needs to be an allrounder and not just a tester because a project is delivered based on his expertise, vision, communication, confidence, and efforts. Testers therefore do not just concentrate on finding bugs but understand the bigger picture in terms of the quality of a product.

Goal Question Metric (GQM) Approach

With the GQM approach, it is possible to attribute metrics to qualify objectives. This allows measuring the degree of attainment of quality objectives. This is a key component of the quality engineering process and at the same time a prerequisite for its continuous monitoring and control.

Focus OKR Areas For QA

The main characteristics of QA as with any other area of work should be actionable, inspirational and time bound
Keeping these factors in mind the following focus areas can help to bring out the best results from the QA team

1. Process Optimization: Implement or upgrade tool environment, increase degree of automation, reduce time of test cycles and hand overs
2. Number of issues and bugs found: This is an absolute value
3. Timing: When speed of testing is important or needs to be improved compared to the previous instance. This parameter can refer to how quickly a module or feature gets tested or responsiveness from task given to task completed
4. Quality: How engineers tasked with fixing reported issues rate them, which could include reduction in bugs in production system, service level agreements and an increase in the identification of the number of bugs
5. Communication and Alignment: Systemize communication with product developers, improve bug reporting flow to product department, collect and prioritize requirements from testers to developers

Sample OKRs For QA And Testing Team

The following objectives work well for QA

Objective – Improve Our Testing Procedure
Key Result 1: Implement test driven development in 3 new development teams
Key Result 2: Increase unit test coverage to 75% of code
Key Result 3: Make sure satisfaction score of product management to testing team is at least 7.5
Key Result 4: Increase time spent on reviewing codes by 20 minutes each day

Objective – Drive Quality For Features In Our New Release
Key Result 1: Identify 15 bugs by the end of Q2
Key Result 2: Ensure there no more than 1 critical bug reported by the end of Q3
Key Result 3: Have 0 regressions in Q3

Objective – Increase Efficiency Of QA Processes
Key Result 1: Compliance to be measured for every sprint
Key Result 2: No show-stopper or critical bug to be open 1 week before release date
Key Result 3: Bug leakage to production for critical issues to be less than 1%
Key Result 4: Less than 3 bugs reported by end-users for every release

The Following Can Be Implemented For The Whole Of The QA Team (Agile Team) Or A Separate Test Team (Waterfall Team)

Objective – Reduce Time Taken To Test New Feature
Key Result 1: Automate 70% of regression tests executed in a feature pull request
Key Result 2: Run regression tests in parallel to reducing execution time to max 0.5 hours
Key Result 3: Maintain records of new automated tests to be implemented before the start of a new project

Objective – Implement 0 Bugs Policy
Key Result 1: 0 critical issues on production
Key Result 2: Write post mortems for every high severity issues found in production

Objective – Test As Early As Possible
Key Result 1: Review every new design and report functional UX issues
Key Result 2: Prepare test plans for new user requirements

Objective – Improve Software Application Performance
Key Result 1: Decrease code review time by half
Key Result 2: Reduce API (Application Program Interface) response time to 4s

Objective – Increase Quality Of Releases And Make Sure They Are Timely
Key Result 1: Increase unit test coverage from 45% to 75%
Key Result 2: Teams to contribute 1200 code reviews at the end of every sprint
Key Result 3: No release to go beyond planned date