I posted recently about applying Business Impact Reporting to testing, but I thought a practical comparison might explain the idea better.
A lot of test reporting still looks something like this:
| Traditional test report | Business impact report |
|---|---|
| 1,247 tests executed | Regression time reduced from 6 hours to 90 minutes |
| 87 bugs found | Testing identified the failure pattern behind recurring customer incidents, giving the team evidence to address the underlying problem |
| Automation coverage increased to 74% | Faster regression now gives the team feedback early enough to fix problems before release |
| 95% pass rate | Support tickets for the affected workflow fell from 27 to 9 following the change |
| Performance testing incomplete | We cannot currently assess peak-load behaviour because of environment instability. This remains a release risk. |
The left-hand side tells people what testing did.
The right-hand side tells them what changed, what we learned, or what risk remains.
I’m not suggesting we stop collecting test counts, pass rates, defects or automation coverage. They can be useful operational metrics within a team.
I’m questioning whether they should be the main story we tell the wider business about testing.
The difficult part is attribution. Testing rarely owns the outcome. Developers make changes, Product makes decisions, Support identifies patterns, Operations provides production evidence. So the aim shouldn’t be to claim “testing reduced support tickets by 67%.”
It should be to make our contribution to that outcome visible and evidenced.
That also means measuring before and after. Without a baseline, we’re mostly describing activity rather than demonstrating change. This was one of the main principles in my original approach.
So I’m curious:
Which side looks more like the reports you produce today?
And if you’ve tried reporting testing in terms of outcomes rather than activity, did it change how the business understood the value of testing?
I wrote up the fuller idea here: https://medium.com/@rforjoe/stop-reporting-test-activity-show-the-business-impact-of-testing-instead-07f1f24f37fe?utm_source=chatgpt.com