Metrics are strange things: it might seem like they don’t cost anything, but they do. As a team behind Allure Report and Allure TestOps, we can confirm that QA metrics are no exception. Gathering them requires work and infrastructure. They have to be maintained. And if a metric carries an actual, measurable cost with it, its existence can only be justified when it provides an actual, measurable benefit. The metric should allow us to make decisions that will result in a net benefit for the team and the company.
Say we’ve counted the number of bugs that have emerged in production. What next? Sure, having 0 bugs would be awesome, but what does that number tell us about how we should distribute our effort? In and of itself — nothing, which means that the cost of gathering that metric is not offset by any benefit.