Dahlia Bock

My colleague Pat Kua recently wrote about improving collaboration between developers and testers. I agree with him on a lot of his points, especially about focusing on the behavior of the system instead of shifting blame on a team member, but my past experiences on projects have been a little different (don’t worry Pat, I’m disagreeing in a good way).

I think using the words “defect” or “bugs” is okay, and it doesn’t really matter, at least to me, because that’s what they are if the system doesn’t conform to the expected behavior. What I think is important is that we have a good rapport between developers and testers and that we all agree that it’s all about getting the stories fully completed and signed-off. If time needs to be spent between a developer and tester to work out how to test a story, or why a certain behavior in the system is not observed when all the tests are passing, etc, then that time should definitely be spent.

I agree with Pat that the language that we use with each other is important (though I don’t mind joking around with my team about bugs in the code, or getting stories across the tester-fence, which again highlights how important a solid team bond is). For example, instead of saying “I found a defect in your code”, I think we should say, “I found a defect in the code”. Collective code ownership not only applies to developers, but the code should be shared amongst the whole team, testers and managers alike.

Saying “I found a few defects in the code. Could you possibly sit with me to take a look at it?” goes a long way.