Skip to content

Module 11: QA Strategy and Metrics

← Accessibility Testing | Topic Home | Next → Capstone Project

Status Difficulty Time

Test plans; risk-based testing prioritization; test management concepts; quality metrics (defect escape rate, flaky test rate); QA in CI/CD pipelines.

Overview

This module is a stub. Content will be added in a future iteration.

Topics covered in this module:

  • The QA strategy document — what it contains, who reads it, how it changes across the project lifecycle
  • Risk-based testing — identifying and prioritizing the highest-risk areas of a system; risk matrices
  • Test planning — scope, entry/exit criteria, resource estimation, schedule
  • Test management concepts — defect lifecycle, test case management (TestRail-style concepts), traceability
  • Quality metrics that matter:
  • Defect escape rate (bugs found in production / bugs found total)
  • Flaky test rate (flaky tests / total tests — should be < 1%)
  • Mean time to detect (how long from bug introduction to detection)
  • Test suite execution time (should fit CI/CD pipeline budget)
  • Mutation score (quality of test coverage)
  • QA in CI/CD pipelines — test tiers, parallelization, quality gates, merge blocking
  • Building a QA culture — working with developers, product managers, and stakeholders
  • QA in Agile — testing within sprints, Definition of Done with testing criteria
  • Shift-left and DevOps testing — developer-owned quality, test-in-production strategies

Prerequisites

  • All previous modules in this topic (01–10)
  • Understanding of software development processes (Agile, CI/CD)

Objectives

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

  1. Write a QA strategy document for a real or realistic application
  2. Apply risk-based prioritization to a test suite, focusing effort on high-risk areas
  3. Define and track quality metrics that are meaningful and actionable
  4. Design a CI/CD pipeline test strategy with appropriate quality gates
  5. Articulate the tradeoffs between testing thoroughness and development velocity
  6. Build the case for QA investment using economic arguments and quality metrics
  • [[devops-platform-engineering]] — CI/CD pipelines are the infrastructure for this module's quality gates
  • [[feature-flags-monitoring]] — Monitoring provides the production-side quality signal that complements testing
  • [[qa-testing/modules/12_capstone-project]] — This module provides the strategy framework for the capstone