> show me how you have 10 times less bug reports than the next guy.
You can't actually do that because there are too many other differences. However good tests do in the long run tend to result in high quality code.
If nothing else because sometimes the obvious fix for one bug breaks something seemingly unrelated where the obvious fix is to undo the first first. I've seen that go on for 4 rounds over 8 years in one company with different contractors doing the work every time (only by luck one of the few full time employees happened to review the code twice and think to check version control to see the history of the obvious fix).
Tests are more expensive to get an equivalent quality version one out the door in general. (if you have a 15 year development cycle maybe not). However by the time you are on version 3 you save yourself a lot of retesting the same thing again to get quality.
Though the most obvious affect of tests is as you say: a metric that management can brag about. Also one of the few metrics where gaming the metric for more isn't entirely bad (though it can be a waste of money!)
You can't actually do that because there are too many other differences. However good tests do in the long run tend to result in high quality code.
If nothing else because sometimes the obvious fix for one bug breaks something seemingly unrelated where the obvious fix is to undo the first first. I've seen that go on for 4 rounds over 8 years in one company with different contractors doing the work every time (only by luck one of the few full time employees happened to review the code twice and think to check version control to see the history of the obvious fix).
Tests are more expensive to get an equivalent quality version one out the door in general. (if you have a 15 year development cycle maybe not). However by the time you are on version 3 you save yourself a lot of retesting the same thing again to get quality.
Though the most obvious affect of tests is as you say: a metric that management can brag about. Also one of the few metrics where gaming the metric for more isn't entirely bad (though it can be a waste of money!)