I have a data migration project going on. There's a semantic mapping tool in the middle to translate between two DBs. I'm testing that.
However, some issues that I find are fairly...blocking. E.g, one that causes the wrong number of values to appear in every column in the new database. Fairly big.
As a result, any other tests I write that get masked by this issue I can't know if the test is right yet, or if once the blocking issue is fixed we may see more issues, or whether everything will pass.
The project manager wants to know progress and when I said it's tricky to tell because of this massively blocking issue, says "put it this way, how many tests have you written?".
To me this is a horribly inaccurate measure, as the tests could be wrong, or new bugs could cause new tests to need to be written, or we may run into even further blockers, let alone the fact that the tests will need to be re-run.
He finally insisted that I tell him how many tests I've written, at which I could say "80%, but..." and he said "well there's a metric!". I tried pointing out why it's not a realistic one to measure progress though.
Are there more legitimate ways to report progress to project managers when you have big blocking issues potentially masking further problems?