Testers – Don’t wait to be asked for info

To me, the whole point of being a tester is the ability to not only find but share information to teams. It’s not enough to do the testing and find out loads of quality information, we have to share it to decision makers too. This means we need to be ready to push narratives and information, even when nobody is asking us to.

Teams don’t know what to ask for

Even in 2023 most development teams probably haven’t worked with testers that are proactive communicators; they’re used to bugs raised quietly in Jira or a status report occasionally at the end of a project. This means they don’t know what good looks like in terms of quality reporting, so can’t ask for it.

If we ask teams to tell us what to tell them, they’re probably only going to know to say bugs in Jira and the occasional end of project report. We can’t rely on that as a measure of good, we need to take control and tell them what they need to know!

set out your stall

If we’re going to start pushing information to people, we need to give them a heads up of what to expect from us and how they can use it / why they need it. This means setting out your stall as if we were selling testing into a project.

We, as testers, know what people need to know about quality and testing generally: What do we know about, How good is it, What problems might there be and maybe some kind of update on How long testing will take. So let’s make sure we set up communications to tell them about these things.

• What do we know about – Coverage against functionality, stories or requirements. A view on what tests we’ve run and how deep that testing has been as well as what we haven’t run and so don’t know about.
• How good is it – Narratives on what’s working, the behaviour of what’s been built and information from benchmarking we’ve done.
• What problems might there be – Defects, areas of risk and things we just don’t know about because we haven’t tested them.
• Testing progress – A view on how much more testing is needed and how long that might take, status reports and estimates.

Sometimes we can feel that the only thing that matters is progress and getting to “100% coverage” because the business only cared about timelines. That’s when we have to stop, reflect and ensure we’re pushing the right messages about quality too. We might worry that communicating that “this hasn;t been tested” will look bad on us, because we’re not hitting timelines, but it’s important to share so that people can know what’s unknown and what risks are out there.

Pushing Info

As test professionals, we’re the experts in quality and how to share information about it. This means we have to do the thinking and set our own requirements on quality communications.

• Don’t be afraid – You’re not going to get into trouble for sharing information that will help people. You’ve been hired into a team to gather and share this information, you already have an implicit “it’s okay to do this”.
• Make it meaningful – If you’re not getting engagement on your communications, maybe it’s not meaningful to the audience. Help them to understand why this info is useful by tailoring your messages and tell them why they should care.

If you want to share information to the business, talk in language they understand. What features do we know about, how do they work and why is this good? Don’t provide a list of abstract test names (or worse a test percentage completion report) as this won’t mean anything to them.

• Make it timely – Share information as soon as you have it, so that you maximise the amount of time people have to react to it and make fixes if they need to.
• Be proactive – It’s harder to have to put yourself out there and push for things, rather than to be asked. Being asked means you have a pull for info and you know what they want to see… but it might be the wrong thing. We have to create a pull by being proactive and pushing things we know they need first.
• Be extrovert – It might feel like we’re over communicating and it might take more effort to speak up, but that’s what’s needed in order to share information. Make sure to be vocal in the right places so that your information isn’t lost and prioritise public channels over one to one conversations (to make sure information isn’t lost).
• Look up templates or ask people – There’s loads of people in the testing community that can help you, look for ways of reporting that other people have had success with and steal / reuse them. Just make sure to tailor any templates to what you need, rather than using them blindly.
• Work with tech – We all work remotely, so embrace that and use slack to push your quality narratives. People can get nervous about speaking up ad-hoc in zoom calls too, if that’s you then ensure you push yourself onto the agenda so you have a planned time and space to share information.

Even SDITs and Automation testers need to do this

It doesn’t matter what type of tester you are, as that just specifies what tools and techniques you use to find information. All testers need to be able to push information about quality into teams by knowing what to share and how to share it.

Don’t fall into a trap of thinking “oh that’s not my role”; because sharing information is the role of anyone who’s testing.

INSTEAD OF WAITING TO TELL PEOPLE WHAT THEY THINK THEY WANT TO KNOW, TESTERS NEED TO PUSH WHAT THEY NEED TO KNOW. BE BRAVE AND COMMUNICATE INTO TEAMS TO SUPPORT THEM.