I’ve seen a couple articles in various business magazines and the newspaper recently about properly aligning your reward system to properly motivate employees. Or more specifically, the actions which are measured are getting behavior to achieve the reward, not the one which the system is trying to achieve.

So how do you motivate testers, or more importantly, what measurements do you use to determine whether a reward is given? Here are some of the ones I’ve been inflicted with.

  • Number of Bugs – This has all sorts of flaws, not the least of which is flooding the system with duplicate or way less than useful bugs
  • Number of Bugs that make it to Production – There are all sorts of reasons why bugs don’t get caught — or released. Testers don’t have the final say on when a release should go, so this is out of their control
  • Test Cases Executed – Not only does this not factor in things like Exploratory Testing, but also has no impact on the end quality
  • Product shipped on-time – Again, testers don’t control when the ship happens. And if they did, they could skimp on depth of testing to make the date

None of those felt useful then, and certainly don’t now. What criterion do people use on their teams to measure tester success?