Abstract: Craftspeople from all disciplines refine their language to sharpen their knowledge and communicate precisely about the way they work. A handful of practitioners have worked to expand testing language but most testers have not learned to adopted it. Some testers even reject the necessity to improve their language skills, choosing instead to perpetuate misunderstandings. We can either start improving the way we talk about testing, or continue fooling people into believing testing does not require skill.
In this session, I’ll teach you testing-related language skills that may change how you think about and explain your testing work. One example is Safety Language, which is a precise way of speaking that separates observation from inference. Safety Language can help testers highlight uncertainty to trigger important discussions. I’ll show you a technique I use to remove ambiguities from my own verbiage as well as helping other people remove them. This technique is especially helpful when collaborating with other Agile teams on tasks such as integration testing. We’ll use group discussion, videos, exercises, and lecture in an attempt to increase our command of testing language...which, in turn, may even strengthen our reputations as excellent testers.
This session targets testers but contains ideas that might be helpful to anyone working on a software development team.
Learning Outcomes: - Exposure to more than 20 (old and new) testing terms to help discuss testing and share knowledge.
- Why and how to speak precisely about the difference between inference and observation.
- Tester language heuristics that can help improve communication.
- Awareness of personal pronoun usage and its affect on testing-related communications.
- How Agile board column names affect team language and reduce or improve teamwork.
Attachments:
