5 Things You Should Tell Your Testers

Elizabeth is a freelance writer and project manager living and working in London. She runs The Otobos Group, a project communications consultancy specializing in project management.

  Quality   Testing/Test Management  

The testing team forms a small sub-group within your project team. They’ll be looking to you as the project manager for guidance on what to expect from the testing on this project, and how you expect them to go about it. Here are five things to remember to tell your testers before they get started with their work.

1. Please don’t offer solutions. Inexperienced testers often feel as if they should offer solutions. The test has gone wrong and they’ve marked it down as “failed.” Then they’ve added a sentence to the test logs to say what the answer should be.

It’s fine to spell out what the correct test result should be (if that isn’t clear), but they shouldn’t add notes to the developers about how to correct the problem. Ideas like calling different database tables or changing the website CSS might appear useful, but they don’t add much apart from a layer of confusion.

It’s unlikely that the testers have the deep system knowledge that the people who built it do. Of course, if you are peer reviewing another tester’s code, then maybe you do. In that case, what you’re offering is mentoring to a peer: pointing out how they could improve their code. And if they don’t want that sort of feedback, then you still shouldn’t offer it.

Generally, it helps the dev team more to fully understand…

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