Excellent communication skills are a necessity for effective testing.
Testers usually deal with customer proxies, development, marketing, their own management, and who knows who else.
Testers must communicate clearly and effectively. Why? Because the predominant output of testing is information and quality feedback!
Daily we communicate:
- our opinion of the quality of the software we test
- identify quality risks
- features which require re-design
- reproducible bugs
- areas where we hope to pursuade development to invest additional resources
- usability enhancements
- suggestions that would facilitate development producing greater quality software
To negate the "them versus us" hole that testing and development can sometimes fall into, we must remember that developers are intrinsically linked to the code they develop. When we critique their code we must critique in a manner that we do not attack the developer and that we support and encourage the developer to improve the code.
We're all here to do the one job: produce high quality software that is fit for use.
Communication enables us to do that job!
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