Testers can help increase cooperation across the company, and cooperation will help us and the company.
Testers give feedback to developers when we test. We should also get feedback from other departments and customers on our work and the product we are testing. The feedback we get from cooperating with other departments brings the perspectives of customers and other departments into our testing. These additional perspectives help our testing, help us learn about the company and help break down barriers within the company.
When testers get feedback on the product from other departments, we also foster cooperation between them. Cooperation helps the company. If departments cooperate rather than compete against each other they will accomplish more. The company can be described as a system. If you improve one part of the system separately you can also destroy another part of the system.[1] Cooperation helps the whole system improve.
Cooperation also helps develop testers’ potential. Learning from other departments in the company will also help a tester if they would like to progress in their career because it will help them gain a broader perspective of how the company functions.
We can cooperate with developers and learn from them for example, I was introduced to GitHub Copilot by a developer. We can also learn from Developers how they perceive risks and then use what we have learned when we test.
“Everyone in engineering design, purchase of materials, testing materials and testing performance of a customer has a customer…Why not get acquainted with the customer?”[2] I have learned a lot about customers from talking to Customer Support\Success, and have taken that learning into my testing and the development team’s work. Talking to Salespeople is also useful. I once created a stakeholder map from conversations with the Sales Team and shared the information it contained about our customers across the company.
“Teamwork is sorely needed throughout the company. Teamwork requires one to compensate with their strength someone else’s weakness, for everyone to sharpen each other’s wit with questions”[2]. We can help improve teamwork across the company through discussions with people in different roles than our own. These discussions will help us learn from others in the company and we can take what we learn into our testing. We may, for instance, learn that a particular feature is often discussed between customers and customer support, this learning can be taken into our testing.
Cooperation is part of W. Edwards Deming’s theory of management. Point 9 of his 14 Points for Management is: We should “break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales and production must work in a team, to foresee problems of production and in use that may be encountered with the product or service.”[3]
Testers can improve cooperation across the company, which is good for testing, testers and the company.
References
[1] 2003 Ackoff Seminar Part 1 of 4 from the Deming Cooperative (2019)
[2] Out of the Crisis by W. Edwards Deming (1986, p62)
[3] Out of the Crisis by W. Edwards Deming (1986, p24)
TestAndAnalysis 