When you start testing of a new application, do you have a rate of finding defects in mind (say 1 defect every 10 minutes on an average)?
Do you focus on that?
Do you calculate the rate at the end of testing?
I don’t focus on defect detection rates or Meantime between failures MTBF. What mostly interests me is MTTR – mean time to recover, ie how fast the defect turn around time is. Sometimes it can be interesting to look at how many “iterations” a defect have before it is closed, but that depends on the number of dev teams.
I don’t use any defect detection rate. Personally, I don’t think it is ok to define this rate because defects have different severity. You can find 10 minor bugs in one day and 2 major bugs in the next day. Of course, there can be used metrics with various weights for defects characteristics (severity, likelihood etc.) but you risk focusing more on this metrics/rates and less on testing and quality.
I have seen managers that use this defect detection rate as a target for the testing team during a specific iteration/sprint, but the rate is set by the managers and not by the testers
