Communication

A process by which information is exchanged between individuals through a common system of symbols, signs, or behavior

Information is the resource all project activities ultimately depend on. If the development team has incorrect or insufficient information about the customer's requirements, this will be reflected in the final product. This makes human interaction and communication critical for the team's success. While everyone on the team will be asking lots of questions and needs good interaction skills, these skills are especially important for testers, who so often bridge gaps in understanding or assumption between customers and programmers. Have you ever taken your car to a mechanic and tried to describe the funky noise coming from the right rear wheel? Think of a tester as the person who knows just how to mimic that noise, so the mechanic can figure out what the problem is. Testers are interpreters in a land often strange to both programmers and customers, clarifying each group's requirements to the other.

Testers contribute to a project's success by asking the right questions. The movie and television show M*A*S*H had a character, Radar O'Reilly, who knew before anyone else when helicopters were about to land with wounded soldiers. As a tester, you need some of Radar's prescient qualities. You need to know when customers are not saying what they mean. You need to be an analyst (sometimes you might need to be a psychoanalyst!) You need to detect when the programmers have missed something the customer wanted. You need to be alert to the incoming wounded, raising a flag when your gut tells you the programmers have underestimated or run into a roadblock that will prevent them from meeting a deadline.

Testers actively collaborate with customers. If you're using agile practices but aren't able to have an onsite customer who works with the programmers on a daily basis, the tester can shuttle between the customer and the development team, acting as a customer proxy. This book is intended to help you define your own tester role. You can boil down the information and present it in a nutshell to the customer at the start of your project, so she understands your relationship to the team.

In addition to facilitating communication between other members of the team, testers have something of their own to communicate: a vision for testing within the project. This vision has to be driven by the major risks affecting the correctness of the delivered system. It provides a foundation and guiding light for the team's decisions on everything from what test tools to use, to which tests to automate, to when and whether to release. This foundation includes gradually realizing and adjusting the vision to the circumstances.