Improve KPIs twice? Done!

Sooner or later, every tester gets into the situation where project manager or customer, who might not understand the testing process  (but knows how to count money), requests to improve particular metric (testing velocity, product quality, test coverage ...). When I was in this situation for the first time (with the goal of increase testing efficiency by 30%), a huge effort was spent to get 10% improvement. At that time initial goal seemed unrealistic. But based on the experience gained after that, in my current project I was able to improve testing efficiency by 2.5 times. I'll tell you about the ways I used to reduce time for testing activities and to improve the quality of the product.