“Does my bum look big in this?” Learn to inform constructively.

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OK, we lied, there is never a right way to say “yes” to that question. However, as testers (and most roles), there are times when we have to communicate negative or difficult messages to others. It’s vital that we can learn to do this without generating emotional situations, destroying people’s trust or causing conflict.

More generally though, have you ever said something that someone has completely misinterpreted? Most of us work in teams, and even though communication seems simple and is something we do every day, a lot of our communication is misunderstood, which can lead to developing the wrong thing! This is further complicated for teams that aren’t co-located.

Learning ways to communicate helps us to understand people and situations better, which helps to create an environment where problem solving and idea creation can thrive. A team which has good, open communication can collaborate towards the right end product. Being a good communicator and being able to resolve any differences means you build the trust and respect of your team and business stakeholders that you need to be able to do your job well.
This session is suitable for testers of any experience level, as well as team members in any discipline who are interested in improving tester-coder communication and collaboration. The session will:
-look at all the ways we communicate daily, then focus on the key communications of a test engineer and ways to do this well.
-look at the information testing can provide and ways to communicate that information so that it is received well.
-identify one of the key skills a team needs, which is even more key as a tester helping to deliver quality.
-look at ways to build communication skills within common meetings within the agile process.
-identify key ways to maintain good communication within distributed teams.