In all the years working as QA with multiple software development teams, I have seen how good communication between team members impact the success of a project or deliverables. Regardless of what the size of your team, following are few practices to have good communication.
Communicate the idea, discuss and decide together
How many times have you been in a situation where you are rushed to complete testing because the deadline is tomorrow? To make it worst, it is not done according to the requirement of the product owner. By getting everyone involve early we could:
- Get everyone input and refine the requirements.
- Get everyone aligned with the requirements.
- Estimate the efforts and agree on a timeline.
Document all requirements and changes to it.
Imagine you are being interrogated by an Inspector about a murder that happened near your neighbourhood 2 days ago, wouldn’t it be easier to convince the inspector if you have written down what you were doing at that time? Well, I might have exaggerate it a little but I hope you get the rough idea of why we need to document it. Some of the advantage of having it documented are:
- As reference during the development.
- As reference when any of the team member disputing the requirements.
- As reference for others to understand the feature without asking any of the team member.
It is also good to establish what the main medium/tool to document all these requirements. So in an event where the requirement changes without the participation of all team members, everyone will get the information as it is the only place everyone should be referring to.
There is no such thing as over communicate.
Depending on the size of the team, the degree of communication complexity is different. For a small team that concise of a few members, daily stand up should be sufficient but for a larger team it will be a little harder. Some of the things I do to communicate in my team:
- Sending daily updates to the team.
- Regroup : whenever I feel the project is in jeopardy, call everyone to discuss and decide on it. This can be anything from a work delayed, dispute on requirements or anything at all.
- Personally checking with the team members
If you are reading this till the end, I would like to express my gratitude for spending your time on it. I am more to a face to face discussion guys rather writing my thought into writing. This is why I am embarking in this journey of writing what I have learned so far.