Using CA Application Test › Using the Workstation and Console with CA Application Test › Building Documents › Generating Metrics

Generating Metrics

Metric collection, our own metric calculation method, is an extensible reporting mechanism, and lets you generate reports to various outputs.

Metrics lets you apply quantitative methods and measurements to the performance and functional aspects of your tests, and the system under test.

The software metric is a measure of some property of a piece of software, a hardware system, or their specifications. Quantitative methods using metrics have proved to be powerful in several areas of computing, and testing is no exception.

Two broad groups of metrics are:

• Gauge: A gauge provides an instantaneous reading of a value, such as response time or CPU utilization.
• Counter: A counter provides a continuous count of a property, such as the number of failed tests. If a metric is a counter, then it is essentially an ever-increasing number during the test run (that is, number of errors). When a metric is flagged as a counter, it is graphed differently in the reporting console. The value that is graphed is the difference between the current sample and the previous sample.

For most metrics, the type of metric (gauge or counter) is already known. When a metric could be used as either, you can specify the type that you want.

Metrics can be added to the following staging documents and test suite documents. Test monitors and quick tests can generate metrics. Information about specifying and generating metrics for each document or test is available in sections about each editor.

• Quick Tests: Use to monitor the test.
• Staging Documents: Use to include in reports.
• Test Suite Documents: Use to include in reports.
• Test Monitors: Use to monitor tests.