Interview with a system

You cannot not communicate – to state a simple fact right in the beginning. Every day you write emails, facilitate meetings, participate in conference calls, document and present your work, debate with your colleagues…the list goes on.

No wonder, that there was a lot written about how to communicate better and more effective, so everyone can improve on this topic. In agile environments this is even more important, as communication is one of the sharpest weapons to face uncertainty and complexity. Especially testers on an agile team communicate a lot.

With the product owner and business analysts to evolve and improve PBIs, with the developers to eliminate defects and this list can also be added on almost endlessly. But we often forget about one of our most important communication partners – the system under test. Testing software is communicating, or more precisely interviewing, the system with the goal to assess its quality and to find defects, before the customer finds them. And so almost the same rules apply as in the daily communication with your teammates.

This talk will show how following communication rules can improve the testing practice and gives valuable tips from the trenches to incorporate in your daily testing work. And – value-added – applying the presented rules will also improve the overall communication in your business context.