Analyze defect trends

This document explains how to use TestOps capabilities to view defect trends over a specific period.

Overview

Viewing and analyzing defects trend helps you identify patterns in how defects are created, resolved, and accumulated over time. Analyzing these trends helps spot quality degradation early and provides additional insight to release health. In TestOps, this could be done with the Defects Activity Analysis Report.

Steps to view defect trends

In TestOps, you can access the Defects Activity Analysis Report through multiple routes:

• Via the Analytics & Trends Dashboard: the Defect Activity Trend widget can be expanded to navigate to the Defects Activity Analysis Report.

• Via Analytics > Reports > Defects Activity Analysis Report.

Once you've accessed the report, follow these steps to analyze defect trends.

Step 1: Configure data scope

• Set data scope and intervals:
  • Quarterly analysis: 3 months, weekly interval
  • Annual analysis: 12 months, monthly interval
  • Sprint analysis: sprint, daily interval
  • Release analysis: release, weekly or daily interval

Step 2: Analyze defects trend for insights

Common scenarios to look out for:

Scenario	Meaning
- Consistently high green bars - Consistently low red bars at an acceptable threshold Trend line is flat or declining	Defects resolved at a healthy pace, team is keeping up with issues, no strong sign of quality degradation or risks
- High green bars for highly severe defects and medium red bars for medium/low severity defects	Team is effectively handling defects at this importance level
- Consistently high red-to-green bar ratios - Trend line gradually rising	Incoming quality issues are outpacing resolution, team capacity may be insufficient or bug fixes are taking too long.
- Abnormal spike in red bars without rise in green bars - Trend line spike same day/week	Potential bad deployment/feature introduced, or environment issues.

Step 3: Take action

1. Save filters as different views that clearly displays bottlenecks (accumulating defects, unresolved ratio high in severe defects,...)
2. Share views to communicate with stakeholders to plan resolution strategies.

tip

• Combine with analyzing defects status to effectively plan resolution strategies.
• Sort defects by dates to prioritize critical defects that take too long to resolve.
• Detect systemic defects (consistently rise at release/sprint start, code merges, or plateau despite team growth) that require process changes, training, or architectural improvements, different from one-off defects.
• When defect trends look manageable, navigate to Release Health dashboard to properly assess release health.