Taking Testing Seriously

CHAPTER 5How to Account for Your Work

—By James Bach, Michael Bolton, Huib Schoots, Jon Bach, and Aaron Hodder

In RST, responsible tester is a term of art. One of the differences between responsible testers and people merely doing some testing is that responsible testers are accountable for the quality of the work. Responsible testers commit to explaining and justifying what they did to test.

The ultimate goal of responsible testers is to serve their clients by delivering necessary information effectively, ethically, and accountably, transforming assumptions into facts. Meanwhile, there is a secondary goal: we need support for our work as testers. Our clients won't support us unless they think we are doing good work.

Both of these goals require storytelling. When telling the story of the status of testing, we call this test reporting. When telling the story of why you are following a particular test strategy and how that matters to the business, we call this test framing.

We wrote a little about stories in Chapter 2, “Foundation.” This chapter goes into more detail.

Telling a Compelling Story

To tell a story that reasonable people will listen to—then act upon—our prime heuristic is to answer these questions: “What's up? Says who? So what?”

• What's up? This question is about what is special and different today from the ordinary run of things. The key difference between all the data in the world and a story is curation. You make choices about what is relevant and what to ignore. ...