Testing is Socially Challenging

This post has been brewing for a while, but a LinkedIn conversation today reminded me to put it in the bottle and ship it.

Testing is socially challenging. There’s a double meaning there.

One meaning is that testing involves challenging the product and our beliefs about it, in a social context.

The other meaning is that probing the product and people’s beliefs about it can sometimes be uncomfortable for everyone concerned. That makes testing socially difficult, or socially awkward.

Testers sometimes resist the first thing because of the second thing. That is: there’s a risk of social disharmony when we ask pointed questions, or “too many” questions, or when we look for deep bugs, or when we find serious but subtle bugs.

In some cases, testers might feel vulnerable to being rejected or dismissed by others on the team. In other cases, there’s a risk that someone will be upset by a question, or by a bug report. In those cases, care for the feelings and vulnerabilities of others might restrain us from voicing problems or concerns. Either way, someone — the tester or the one or more of the tester’s clients — may feel unsafe. How do we address that problem?

As testers, it’s important for us to feel safe in certain ways. For instance, we should not have to deal with abuse, harrassment, prejudice, racism, sexism, and the like; nor should our organizations tolerate any of that. It is appropriate and necessary for us to anticipate, desire, and require that kind of safety.

Even when those issues are managed appropriately, our job as testers is to identify real and potential problems. People don’t like having to deal with problems; they don’t even particularly like being aware of problems. For testers, the risk of controversy and social upset is always present as part of the job. That risk can make any of us feel unsafe to some degree from time to time.

To deal with that risk, it might be more important for us to feel strong. That feeling of strength can come, at least in part, from developing technical, social, and personal skills.

By “technical skills”, I mean not only knowledge of technology and how to apply it. I’m also refering to techniques of modeling, analysis, critical thinking, and so forth. That includes the ability to gather and organize evidence about what we’ve seen, and to describe facts about products, problems, and risks.

By “social skills”, I mean the ability to work with people collaboratively, as individuals and within groups; to frame our questions and our reports in ways that respect other people and the difficulty of their work; and to deal with interpersonal problems when they come up.

By “personal skills”, I mean the ability to organize and prepare ourselves to get our work done — including the development of technical and social skills.

One crucial personal skill is to accept that other people may feel bad about the questions we’re raising, the problems we’re reporting, or the risks that we’re identifying — and that we don’t have complete control over that. The feedback that we provide is a kind of gift, and sometimes people don’t like what they perceive when they first open the package — and maybe for a while after that.

A key element in all this is to focus ourselves and our work on helping our testing clients to be both safe and strong. We’re trying to help people to build and defend the value of the product. Alas, that often means invalidating some assumptions and puncturing some of their illusions about the product, It sometimes means delivering bad news. It means raising questions like these. All of these things can be painful at times.

We can apply our technical and social skills to the very best of our ability — to discover the facts about the product; to report them diligently and dispassionately; to honour the knowledge, skills, and feelings of other people. Yet when confronted with a question or a problem, people may still be upset: surprised, confused, impatient, frustrated, or angry.

When they’re feeling like that, their reactions may be misdirected towards us. In such cases, it can be really important for us to avoid taking those misdirected reactions personally. That’s both socially and personally challenging, but it’s an essential self-defense skill for a tester.

As testers, I want us to be strong, so that we can help our clients and their products to be strong too. We can do that.

Several years ago, Aaron Hodder pointed me to this video clip, which I consider profound and insightful. It’s about students and safety on college campuses, but I believe it has relevance for people and and safety in development groups too.