We Need to Talk More

Okay testers, we need to talk… I mean that literally, we need to talk or speak out or communicate more into our teams.

Testing is all about finding out information to share with people, so that they can be informed about quality and make decisions based off of that. This means one of the biggest skills in testing is the ability to speak up and communicate to teams.

Teams are increasingly expecting more engagement and want more vocal testers. Gone are the days where engineers roll their eyes at hearing test speak up; nowadays they crave the engagement and information because they care about what they’re building, they want to know how to make it better.

Here are the types of things testers usually get asked to speak out about.

How are we Testing?

Teams want to understand how their testers can (and are) helping them. This is less about tracking the work their doing day to day and more about understanding “what is testing giving us?”

I’ve spoken about setting out your stall in testing and selling testing into a team, most of this is communicating how we can help and what we propose to do. This can be via a clear test approach or strategy or a discussion to let people know what to expect.

How can the team engage with you, what reports or info will they get, what can they expect you to do in meetings, where can they find information about test? These are all useful things to put in front of the team to make clear to them, rather than assume they know (because all testers work differently).

How good is what we’ve built?

Teams want to know the outcomes of testing. Is the software good, can we ship it, are there areas we don’t know about? This helps them to understand if more effort is needed to work on something or if it can be called “done”. Effectively, it’s information to help them make decisions.

This can be sharing a quality narrative following testing, a test report or even a discussion about coverage and risks. Teams want to have that information pushed to them (or know where to find it) pretty frequently, the earlier we share the information the quicker we can make decisions based on it.

What have we covered?

Teams want to know where the risks are. Are there areas that we don’t have information about, or haven’t tested? Understanding this allows us to know if there are things that we wouldn’t know about if they went wrong, so that we can put a plan in action to deal with that.

This is about sharing information about what we’ve tested to people, creating a coverage report and raising issues to people about gaps in our knowledge. It’s okay to not have covered something yet, this isn’t about showing that you’ve failed as a tester, it’s about making sure we’re making informed decisions.

Making things transparent

So teams want to know about testing, what do we do about that? We need to talk more and push information into our teams.

We can’t assume people will speak on our behalf, or that people can assume that no news is good news. We have to actively share information to people.

• Put updates in Slack on public channels so everyone can see them. I like a message that says “we’ve covered these things and here’s what we saw about them” with a link to the test notes.
• Document strategy and ways of working and share these to the team. Don’t assume people know what testing concepts or approaches mean, share these so that people know how to work with you and get info.
• Make reports for testing updates, coverage and updates on quality. You can use existing artefacts for this or implement a test management tool to help you (good for audibility).
• Be vocal and speak up in meetings share where we’re at, share risks, ask questions and test things in meetings. People want to see that things are happening and that their tester is there for them, we can do this by being present in conversations.

But Callum, that’s hard…

Communication takes effort, it’s true. Putting information out there, especially pushing information out at people, can be hard. We might face seeming disengagement, we might have a negative response to our information or we put ourselves out there to maybe look stupid.

I get that, it’s so much easier to just stick to comfort testing and do what we’ve always done, but it’s something we need to train ourselves as a profession to do.

• We can’t rely on having a test lead to speak for us. Many teams now may have you as the only tester, so are looking to you to act as a lead when it comes to communication.
• People are expecting it in more agile teams. Ways of working are increasingly expecting people to engage and push information (rather than waiting to be asked for it), the unspoken assumption is that a good tester will speak up.
• It makes us look more senior to other people. Promotions come to those that look like they can act in a more senior way. Communicating what you do, making things transparent and talking about testing updates will make you stand out as senior/lead material!
• Imposter syndrome is totally a thing, but remember that asking questions isn’t stupid. How else do we learn or get clarity? there’s always someone that’ll benefit from a question being asked and they’ll thank you for being brave enough to speak up.

Testing isn’t just about doing the work, it’s about sharing information too. Do you agree? Let’s discuss it in the comments or on LinkedIn.