Submitted by Jay Philips

I think a great way to show if you and your testing team are adding value to a project & organization is to pull the number of defects found pre-prod that the testing team found and compare them to the number of defects found post-prod.  If it wasn’t for the Testing Team all those pre-prod defects would not have been found, they would have been found by some very unhappy (probably not returning) customers/end users.  You can also take the cost and number of hours that the Production Support team would have spent to support the customer/end user.

A metric that I personally like to show is the “cost of defect corrections” compared to the “cost of defect avoidance” as we all know that a defect found later in the lifecycle costs more to fix as it requires more resources form various groups in an organization.