4 Reasons Why Communication Should be Your Single Most Important Software Testing Goal

Do you know why improving communication should be your single most important software testing goal? Here are four reasons why communication is so critical.

1. Spend Less Time in Meetings, on Calls, and on Email

Effective and efficient communication equips you and your team to spend less time sending email, sitting in meetings, taking phone calls, and providing status updates and spend more time doing the activities you really want to do. Great communication is the foundation of great software testing. Until you have great communication throughout your team and its associated stakeholders, you can try to implement all the improvements you want, but you will continue to get the same results.

2. Accelerate Testing

More efficient communication leads to more efficient testing. When your team gets better information more quickly, they can start testing sooner, and as they find defects, they can communicate and resolve those defects more quickly, which helps accelerate software testing.

3. Reduce Risk

Better communication provides a better shared understanding across the entire team and stakeholders of the risks, issues, and impediments to your projects.

4. Increased Quality

More effective communication leads to more effective testing, which results in delivering higher-quality code.

How to Spot a Communication Challenge

It may be hard for us to admit that we have a communication issue on our team, so it’s good to have a system in place that keeps us objective. Here’s a list of behaviors that should be a red flag that there is a communication challenge:

• Developers and testers act more like adversaries than teammates.
• Testers have a hard time determining what test data to use and where it can be found.
• Different people seem to raise the same questions repeatedly.
• Testers are testing code and features before they are ready.
• The same defects are being reported repeatedly.

Conclusion

I hope this article has inspired you to take a closer look at how your team communicates. Communication is the springboard for improving enterprise software testing, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg. The current IT landscape is complicated — teams are geographically dispersed, businesses are migrating to the cloud, and emerging methodologies like Agile and DevOps are gaining speed. In this fragmented ecosystem, it can be difficult to evaluate or glean any coherent insights from your testing activities. In addition to offering a comprehensive SaaS solution for release and environment management, Plutora also provides test metrics throughout the enterprise. Powerful reporting and analytics tools organize and feed real-time data to reports and dashboards allowing testers, stakeholders and decision makers to know progress and results at any given moment. Get every team in your organization on the same page with Plutora.

Dalibor Siroky

Dalibor is the Co-founder and Co-CEO of Plutora. He has 15 years of leadership, consulting, enterprise product, and operations experience across Australia, Asia and Europe. He has proven ability to build high performance teams, turn around situations, develop innovative products, and create lasting value. Prior to Plutora, Dalibor was founder and managing director of Finotaur, a leading provider of independent management consulting services. Before that he served as CIO of financial advisory software at Macquarie Bank, head of solution architecture at Commonwealth Bank of Australia, and management consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Dalibor got his MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Follow him on Twitter @DaliborSiroky.