Imagine you see another tester testing a text field. He inputs valid&invalid values, special chars, then moves on to other elements. Wait, you think, he missed empty value and the max length of the field. You want to tell him. What will you start with?
"Hey, you missed empty value, and the max length". No, that's weak
"You made a mistake." Better. But not serious enough.
Eventually you come up with this one. "You are a bad tester. I can't believe you are testing so carelessly. Do you understand how important your job is? You are the last defense of quality! If you miss 1 case, it will affect the whole product, and of course customer satisfaction." Here you go.
You start by explaining how important this product is, how important his role is, how a simple mistake would affect the whole team, blah, blah, blah. Because you want your voice sounds serious, authoritative, being heard once and remembered forever. But let's be real, how many times did it work?
Imagine you are testing a product on a tight schedule, hard work for several weeks. Right at this freaking busy and tired moment, someone stops by and says. "You are a bad tester." What's gonna happen next? Of course you start to defend whatever you are doing.
"Oh, empty value? I covered it in a precious text field. I'm on a tight schedule, couldn't cover every type of variable in every text field"
or "I'm using pairwise."
or "Of course we can cover all types for all elements, as soon as our automation is ready."
You might not cover this "empty value" at all, but you would still say so. Because you work hard, you can't just let him judge your job like this. How dare he calling you a bad tester?
I find myself a hard time confronting people in both situations. I seldom succeed, even that I do, it costs too much time and energy, and I piss off someone.
I look for answers from others, and find them divide into 2 groups. Group A loves to confront, it makes them feel more powerful and authoritative, they would do as much as they could; while group B feel it is boring and outputs nothing, they simply shut up. Neither group solves the problem.
Then we started testing dojo. Confronting others becomes a must for every session. The performer is always challenged. It offers me a close look to see how people confront each other, how they tell others their opinions, and how they receive them. I find that the more emotional, personal, judgmental an opinion sounds, the harder the defend will be. And even though everyone knows that we should take nothing personal, it is quite easy to make a conversation personal. See if you say or hear these a lot:
"You are making a mistake."
"Clearly you didn't understand how important this is to us, if you do, you wouldn't do such a bad job."
"You should improve your testing skills."
"Why you didn't test that?"
"How could you miss such a simple case?"
In dojo, we challenge to help people understand what they could do better. But "you made a mistake" doesn't give them a clue. They still don't know how to make things better. On the other hand, a precise challenge, like "we still don't know the boundary of this variable, let's find out", is quite helpful. They are easier to be received. People who get these would not feel offended, they would consider right away whether it makes sense, and give a try.
After realizing this, I start to pay attention to the language I use in dojo. When I'm an auditor, I say, "maybe we could try with empty value, see how the system handles it?". Less "you should...", "I would...", more "what if we..", "can we...".
And when I'm an performer, and getting judgmental and blaming challenges, I would reply with, "Tell me what do we do next?" or "what exactly to improve here?"
Even though I'm trying hard, it is still a little hard for those who attend dojo for the first time. 2 weeks earlier, we organized a testing dojo with developers, trying to improve their testing skills. 3 developers were involved, 2 of them refused to take the performer role, the last one took the job unwillingly.
The performer was quite defensive from the beginning, he asked a lot questions before started testing. He said, "if I don't get it clearly, you will blame me for not doing it later." No matter how many times I told him I wasn't there for judging nor blaming, but helping, he still showed this "I'm angry, be nice" face all the time.
In the book "the fifth Discipline", the author suggests an exercise to master your confronting skills. Draw a vertical line in a white paper to record a conversation. In the left section, write down what kind of tone you need; in the right section, write down the real conversation. See if you are who you think you are. I tried once in dojo, and I was surprised I talked so much just to convince someone was wrong.
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