Why do you think testers become the people who facilitate communication between different teams?

In most of the projects I have worked, I noticed a common theme.

Testers become the people who facilitate communication between the sub teams. Even though the team attends standups and other spring ceremonies together, there is lack of communication between backend and front end teams and the project management teams.

Once the card comes to QA, that is when a lot of questions are asked.

So, how do we solve this ? How do you enable teams to communicate frequently, well and early?

4 Likes

We are the glue to the team :slight_smile: it’s an interesting question. I look forward to seeing responses from other people.

4 Likes

It’s a recurring theme if cross-team standups are not all attended by the same product owner. Most products end up with a proxy PO going to standups, it’s supposed to be their job, but it’s hard work if you are the guy or gal who has to attend 4 standups every morning. Almost nobody wants to go to more than 2 standups.

I do concur @jaswanth , but keen to downplay this and rather just “segue” (segway) things and hint that people across teams talk to each other to resolve design and implementation bugs before we get into bug-tennis mode. I’m a peacemaker at heart, and I wonder if that’s a common test engineer mindset.

1 Like

Haha! Totally agree @conrad.braam

There is always that trade off between too many meetings vs lack of comms.

One way I try to tackle this issue is to try and have all conversations in the common project slack channel where there is more visibility, allowing people to challenge something if they see something wrong.

Most of the times good conversations get too siloed in private chats. Doesn’t do any good to the team IMO.

2 Likes

I guess it’s kind of context dependent but why not. I’m pretty sure for some stuff the tester can become/already is the person who coordinates between different teams.

There are many people who are both tester & analyst so their interaction between teams happens quite often.

The question is how much time will it take to do all the coordination, will it become a new role itself 24/7 if you have a million teams and will you even be testing with all that communication work?

3 Likes

Thats true @jaswanth , QA is backbone knows all sub-systems …
To use teams / slack channels, or have common repository like wiki , confluence etc where everyone update there part and will be easy access and team can write comment etc.

5 Likes

@jaswanth, I think it’s because QA asks so many questions about what is planned, done and expected behavior. It usually uncovers something unknown and we often reach out for to others for the answers we need.

5 Likes