When budgets tighten or deadlines slip, quality assurance (QA) is one of the first things to get squeezed. After all, it doesn’t ship features, doesn’t handle customers, and doesn’t directly generate revenue.
But cutting corners in QA is like skipping the brake check because the tires look fine.
It might save time now … but it’s going to cost you later.
Poor QA leads to bugs in production, burnout on your dev team, missed compliance requirements, and long hours spent tracking down issues that should’ve been caught earlier. (And you don’t always notice the damage until the release is live and users are complaining.)
Done right, QA is a true performance multiplier. It improves release velocity, reduces defects, and builds confidence across teams.
And yes, you can measure all of that.
Let’s break it down.
Measure Escaped Defects to Quantify Business Disruption
When bugs slip past QA and hit production (a process sometimes known as “defect leakage”), the damage spreads fast.
Developers get pulled away from their current work to troubleshoot issues. Support queues fill up. Customers lose patience, or, worse, trust.
These are very real business costs. Every fire drill delays other projects, burns team hours, and risks eroding your product’s reputation.
How to measure this: Track how many bugs are reported post-release. Then, estimate the rework time, the revenue impact of feature delays, or the opportunity cost of diverting engineers from roadmap priorities.
Even a small decrease in escaped defects can save your business thousands.
Measure Time to Resolution to Show Cost Savings
The longer a bug goes undetected, the harder it is to fix.
By the time a defect reaches production, it may have touched multiple systems, confused numerous users, and racked up hours of investigation time.
QA helps teams skip these challenges and shorten the feedback loop. When teams catch issues early:
- Fixes take less time.
- Testers can reproduce bugs faster.
- Logs and test history clarify what went wrong.
- Devs avoid having to unwind downstream dependencies.
How to measure this: Compare average resolution times and team hours spent on bugs found in pre-release testing versus those discovered after deployment. The savings speak for themselves.
Measure Cycle Time to Prove QA Accelerates Releases
It’s a common misconception that more QA slows down releases.
But the opposite tends to be true: Better quality means fewer blockers, less churn, and faster delivery.
Well-run QA workflows shrink the time between code completion and production. Bugs are caught before they snowball, regression tests run in the background, and QA doesn’t have to start from scratch with every new feature.
Tools like TestMonitor help surface actionable metrics—such as mean time to repair, average issue lifespan, and mean time between issues—so teams can spot bottlenecks, measure progress, and identify where releases are getting stuck.
How to measure this: Track average cycle time from dev handoff to deployment. Compare the release velocity before and after test coverage improves.
If QA stops being the hold-up, you’ll know it’s working.
Measure Compliance Coverage to Reduce Risk Exposure
For industries with regulatory oversight, such as finance, healthcare, and education, quality assurance is non-negotiable. One missed test can lead to real consequences, including fines, failed audits, and even data breaches.
QA helps prove due diligence by documenting how systems were tested, how they meet regulatory standards, and where risks were actively addressed. Requirements-based testing ensures you’ve validated what’s mandated. Risk-based testing allows your team to design test cases that zero in on potential vulnerabilities before they hit production.
TestMonitor supports both approaches, which can make it easier to show that compliance isn’t just a checkbox, but a fully baked-in part of your QA strategy.
How to measure this: Map QA efforts to compliance milestones. Track avoided costs such as audit delays, remediations, or reputational risk.
And when your next audit goes smoothly, don’t forget to thank your test cases.
Measure Team Workload to Improve Efficiency and Morale
Burnout isn’t merely bad for team health. It’s also bad for business. When testers are overloaded, developers are stuck in rework limbo, and project managers are chasing down status updates, nobody wins.
Strong QA workflows reduce that friction. Testers can focus on new work instead of revalidating the same scenarios. Devs get quicker, clearer feedback. And the entire team can move with more trust in the process.
TestMonitor’s Tester Workload Report helps managers track and balance assignments across the team, making it easier to spot overload early and distribute effort more fairly. It’s one of those tools that pays off in fewer delays and better team morale.
How to measure this: Track how much time is spent on manual setup, repeated validations, or clarifying bug reports. Then benchmark improvements once better QA tooling and process automation are in place.
Ready to Feel Confident in the ROI of Your Quality Assurance?
When quality assurance is working, it’s quiet.
No fire drills, no angry customers, no surprise bugs.
But that calm is the ROI.
QA investments lead to:
- Better customer experiences.
- Faster, more predictable releases.
- Lower support and rework costs.
If your team is cutting corners to move faster, consider what quality is already saving you—and how much more it could.
Plan a demo with us today to see exactly how to measure the ROI of your quality assurance.
