If you want to read about someone who recorded and used metrics extensively, you can do no better than to read Capers Jones’s books. He was certainly successful in terms of getting well paid consultancy gigs.
Whether he was successful in terms of delivering value to his clients is open to question. I suspect his clients were the kind of people who “manage by numbers”, as is common in America, and who often preside over catastrophic failures because they are measuring the wrong things and making the wrong decisions as a result. I have first-hand experience of this, having worked for four American companies. For your own sanity, I suggest you never work for one.
Personally, I have not found a single statistically valid metric in any of Capers Jones’s writings. That’s not to say there aren’t any, but if there are they’re well hidden. I find his entire approach utterly absurd, but I encourage you to read it just so you know there are people out there perpetuating this stuff. But for heavens’ sake don’t implement any of it.
Qualifications
I haven’t done any of the MOT qualifications, so I can’t comment on them. However, I adhere to the view that there are no best practices - see https://context-driven-testing.com.
Ad hoc testing
It’s often asserted that testing either follows “best practices” (as per the appalling ISTQB) or it’s ad hoc (which is intended to be a criticism). This is a false dichotomy. Some of us who specialise in exploratory testing have developed methodologies that allow for a great deal of exploration and investigation while providing the necessary level of planning, tracking, reporting etc., so we know what we’ve done, what we haven’t done and what the remaining risks are. The bugs we find are usually important and reproduceable. Examples include:
- James and Jon Bach developed session-based testing, in which exploratory testing is time boxed to enable planning and tracking of resources.
- James Bach and Michael Bolton developed their RST methodology.
- I developed a methodology that was inspired by their work, but which is significantly different.
These all provide a “third way” that is more effective and efficient than either a “best practice” or ad hoc approach.
You can get all the session-based testing material free, including a tool that supports it. I don’t like the tool, so we developed an equivalent using Excel spreadsheets and VBA (no, you can’t have it because it’s very hacky, but you can easily develop your own). You can still do the RST course, which I recommend - I put all my team on it. I have a four-day course, but it would require an obscenely large financial inducement for me to deliver it again.
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