For a variety of reasons, many test organizations routinely collect data on defects found during testing, on tests that were run, on estimated time and actual time spent testing, on code coverage, and on customer-reported problems, among other things.

Some of these data only become collectable after formal processes are put in place, while others can be obtained with minimal effort. The subject of this paper is to describe a case study of collecting and using the latter type of data. Four databases are used to track defect data, log test cases, and log customer calls. These data are used to guide efforts at improving the testing process, the test materials, and the databases themselves. For many testing organizations, these data are already available. If not, they are easy to collect.