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28 votes

Why are Fibonacci numbers used for estimating effort?

Fibonacci series is just one example for estimation efforts. Some teams also use series as below: 1, 2, 5, 8, 20, 40, 100, .... 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, .... The idea is to use an exponential ...
JAINAM's user avatar
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23 votes

Why are Fibonacci numbers used for estimating effort?

They reflect that the degree of uncertainty grows as you look further out and at bigger tasks with more dependencies. For example, today you can be reasonably confident about how much effort is needed ...
Michael Durrant's user avatar
11 votes
Accepted

Is it valuable to measure bug count per hour of dev time?

No It absolutely is not valuable to measure bug count per hour of dev time. It is especially bad to measure bug count per hour for individual devs. Devs on more complex or difficult code will ...
Kate Paulk's user avatar
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7 votes

How to establish better tracking of escaped bugs?

This is process related - nothing you can solve as regular QA tester. Your QA manager need to talk to DEV manager how to improve communication between devs, QA and customers, and how to track relevant ...
Peter M. - stands for Monica's user avatar
6 votes

Why are Fibonacci numbers used for estimating effort?

Common estimating methods include numeric sizing as well like 1 to 10 or sizes like XS, S, M, L, XL, XXL, XXXL or Fibonacci sequence 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, etc. The reason for using the Fibonacci ...
Nitin Rastogi's user avatar
6 votes

Measuring integration test efficiency

We thought of some sort of limited coverage measurement - checking if collaboration points like app to database, app to external service are covered by tests. Most code coverage tools allow filtering ...
João Farias's user avatar
5 votes
Accepted

Why are Fibonacci numbers used for estimating effort?

Spoiler: No scientific reason. Fibonacci grows very fast, so people will have fewer options before reaching enormous values; thus it incentivizes breaking work down in smaller pieces. If the ...
João Farias's user avatar
5 votes

Why are Fibonacci numbers used for estimating effort?

A notion I don't see in any of these answers is that in a simple 1-10 range, people can get bogged down in whether something is a 3 or is it really a 4? And what if another person thinks that it ...
Paniom's user avatar
  • 51
5 votes

Types of metrics used in QA management

First of all, you need to define better what you want to measure. Imagine a sports team. One could say that "improving" means "winning more games" - and one could say that a ...
João Farias's user avatar
4 votes

Is it valuable to measure bug count per hour of dev time?

As Kate says NO The common term for kind of metric from those with experience is: A bad metric I'll go even further and say any kind of bug count is likely to be gamed The industry has done thngs like ...
Michael Durrant's user avatar
4 votes

How should a Black-box Tester measure Test Coverage?

Black box approach in and of itself is specifically designed to come from the user perspective backwards. The difference between black box and white box testing is knowledge of the underlying code ...
mutt's user avatar
  • 1,693
4 votes

Whats the meaning of this 'Testing efficiency' number?

Test Efficiency is a measure of the relevance of the bugs being reported. A low efficiency would imply that the test team are reporting many bugs that aren't worth fixing. This is pretty limited, and ...
jruberto's user avatar
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3 votes

Whats the meaning of this 'Testing efficiency' number?

Testing efficiency, among other metrics, is a merely a guideline. It does not tell the whole picture, it has to be put into context in order to make some sense. It is more of an indication used by ...
Yu Zhang's user avatar
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3 votes

Telemetry for feature health

Telemetry can't always pin point problems, but many times it can indicate the existence of a problem. If you expect some problems to occur you can sometimes add smarter telemetry and better analysis ...
Rsf's user avatar
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3 votes

What are the proper metrics and methodologies for measuring how well a QA department is doing?

How many functional test cases have been automated - Regression Automation coverage by different teams. first you must have a requirements traceability matrix to check if all your test cases cover ...
agvera's user avatar
  • 131
3 votes

Why are Fibonacci numbers used for estimating effort?

Posted about this just recently. Reference to the original is at the bottom. Key Idea Suppose you want to know how long a task will take. You take a look at the problem and estimate that it will be ...
qmckinsey's user avatar
3 votes

Why are Fibonacci numbers used for estimating effort?

This question is answered in a blog post by Jeff Sutherland (co-creator of Scrum). It's rooted in a US Department of Defense study on estimation. Rand researchers then studied the effect of the ...
Patrick McElhaney's user avatar
3 votes

Measuring integration test efficiency

Can you detail why you need those metrics? It sounds like you just want to have metrics - but do you have any plan with them afterwards? Personally, I'd first focus on getting the integration tests on ...
FDM's user avatar
  • 5,894
2 votes

metrics in exploratory testing

According to James Bach on his SBTM page, the metrics you may gather from session reports are quoted below. Of course, sessions give you simple stats. You will need manage these into a meaningful ...
FDM's user avatar
  • 5,894
2 votes
Accepted

Tools to display test servers online/offline, db instance etc?

I've used Nagios Core for this before and it sounds ideal for your needs. It can easily monitor almost anything on a remote machine, such as Disk Space, CPU usage, Downtime, Memory usage, Database ...
Iainn's user avatar
  • 173
2 votes
Accepted

Telemetry for feature health

Summary: It's a reasonable concern but not one that I encounter in practice. Create smoke tests that are high level are assert that basic functionality, such as visiting the first page, work. These ...
Michael Durrant's user avatar
2 votes

Is it valuable to measure bug count per hour of dev time?

No, The reasons are many. First, bugs are not quantifiable. You can't add them together and then infer amount of time spent. Secondly, bugs that may be very simple to fix, (maybe even just one ...
Veretax's user avatar
  • 106
2 votes

How to establish better tracking of escaped bugs?

Ideally when end users find a bug testers team is informed before developers. Then after it goes to developers because testers are to be blamed for leftover bugs :-). You should make some arrangement ...
a Learner's user avatar
  • 494
2 votes

What are the proper metrics and methodologies for measuring how well a QA department is doing?

For starters, Working software is the primary measure of progress. Under this perspective, I think all your measures are very fragile, as you mentioned: How many functional test cases have been ...
João Farias's user avatar
2 votes

Why are Fibonacci numbers used for estimating effort?

A reason that wasn't yet mentioned is that it supports well to split a task / user story into two (non-equal) smaller ones - an 8 splits into 5 and 3, etc. Of course, the same is true for combining ...
Aganju's user avatar
  • 121
2 votes

Why are Fibonacci numbers used for estimating effort?

I think the main reason is because it easier to estimate in relative sizes. This is smaller or larger compared to that. If you look at different buildings from a distance, you could say that one is ...
Niels van Reijmersdal's user avatar
2 votes

Why are Fibonacci numbers used for estimating effort?

It is a convenient mathematical sequence whose growth is approximately exponential and not too steep It is the only mathematical sequence whereby tasks may be split into 2 tasks whose estimates are ...
Bohemian's user avatar
  • 121
2 votes

Why are Fibonacci numbers used for estimating effort?

Mike Cohn says in his book Agile Estimating and Planning that he originally used 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 as his sequence until a client said to him "You must be very confident to estimate the size ...
CJ Dennis's user avatar
  • 278
2 votes

Why are Fibonacci numbers used for estimating effort?

II would like to ask that you genuinely try to answer/estimate every question I ask before reading on. The goal of this answer is exactly to make you understand how humans tend to estimate something ...
Flater's user avatar
  • 121
2 votes

Should testers estimate effort only for themselves

I think the effort depends on the definition of "done". If QA is included in the definition of done, meaning a user story is marked as done only if QA is completed then the effort should include ...
PDHide's user avatar
  • 11.1k

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