The 'What' of Data Driven Decisions

· 2 min read

Next week, I will present my talk “Data Driven Decisions in Testing” at my first conference of the year, Agile Testing Days USA 2023.

I’ve given this talk a few times now and once those people have thought about the presentation more in the weeks that follow, they come to me with more questions. They want more examples of how they can start asking questions in their teams to get more data driven decisions happening. This is good! This is the whole idea behind this talk.

So, I’m going to split my answers to this into a mini blog series:

  1. The “What” (this post!)
  2. The “Where”
  3. The “Why”
  4. The “Who”
  5. The “When”
  6. The “How”

I like to start conversations around data gathering with questions like:

  1. What does the user care about with this feature and how can we measure that?
  2. What does success of this feature look like in numbers? - Usage statistics, financial goals, new sales, reduced abandonment rate, better app store reviews, reduced number of errors
  3. What can we measure currently?
  4. What data would we like to track?

These questions are essentially all asking the same thing but the framing of them is different depending on my audience. They all boil down to:

What number do we care about the most as an outcome for this?

Have you tried asking any of these questions in your team? What did you learn?

I’d love to hear from you!