Selling the Vision, not the practices

My efforts so far have just been trying to get a testing/QA culture established here - and educating myself

Finally it all seems to be paying off - it's been agreed that I can now spend 3 out of 5 days testing with a move to fulltime testing status by October
Now that I'll be actually doing rather than just reading theory, I should have a lot of experiences to share and it will be good to give back to the community
I've certainly learned a lot from it

[textile]I find it better to show empathy first - "Isn't it boring to spend months in a test-fix cycle? Some of those bugs you get lumbered with must be tedious."

Then, offer the vision, "Personally, I'd prefer to spend most of my time looking at new features and building new or enhanced functionality... and if my code broke something else, I'd want to know straight away not weeks later"... then, if there is a light in their eyes, offer the solution.

Bear in mind, however, that the outcome of having regression tests is a by-product of TDD not the primary purpose. The primary purpose is to help the team to understand the problem better... to think of it from the outside-in (how do we want to interact with the system/component/class) rather than from the inside-out (how are we going to build and architect such a system/component/class).

On the matter of selling to managers, I have made some notes about it but not had a chance to write the post for it. I'll try to fit that in soon.

I'd focus on showing empathy for the problems they have to face...

I'll offer some common ones but your managers will have their own specific issues too. Much of the managers' pain, in my experience, is about predicting a future that never happens they way that it was predicted. Over budget, late, pressure from their customer/manager/director because they did not predict the future accurately in that enormous gantt chart that made everyone feel safe at the beginning. Then the fire-fighting that goes with that.

Selling to managers is slightly tougher in some ways. Once they are convinced, they will have the difficult challenge of answering to their superiors/customers who have become used to predictive planning and may be scared off by a more adaptive and iterative approach.

I would spend some time getting to know the pains that the project managers face in your organisation. Don't offer solutions, just listen at first. Think about how you might be empowered as a team to solve certain problems... One good way to get these things out in the open is a retrospective on a recent project or phase or iteration. That's assuming you have them. It may or may not be so easy to get one to happen depending on your role and the culture of the company.

I am glad that you get something from me sharing my experiences... Why don't you share your experiences too. What has worked for me may not work so well for you but you will learn lessons along the way and they will be valuable to the community.

All the best

Antony Marcano

I like your Agile articles - we are trying them out where I work so all advice is much appreciated

Thats a very good point about selling the vision - I'm pretty sure I've sold the testing vision to the manager ( though he doesn't quite get it yet and doesn't appreciate that testers are going to be involved ALL the time and not just at the end of a Sprint )

Some of the developers have got it, some remain to be convinced and only the other day one of them was muttering about all the time he'd have to waste writing unit tests
I was thinking along the lines that you mention and tell him that it's better to spend the time writing some tests NOW rather than spend endless months stuck in a fix-test-bug-fix cycle. Sell the vision rather than get stuck in the process - I like that idea

so will you be writing an article on selling the vision to directors or are you leaving that as an exercise for the reader ?
:)

Well, maybe just a *little* better. :P When I started "selling" performance testing 6ish years ago, I was selling on "geeky advantages". I'd get the interest of some techies, but virtually nothing from the people with the money/authority/responsibility to make it happen. Over the years I've learned the same lesson that Antony discusses here. Some of my heuristics when "selling" now include:

• Don't use any "loaded terms" before decisions are made (i.e. Exploratory Testing is so widely mis-understood that you can get exactly opposite reactions from the same people with exactly the same message except one time using the term and one time not)
• Be enthusiastic about the "new" idea, not critical of something else
• Speak about related and relevant personal experiences, rather than abstract theory or "stuff you read"
• Try to get the person engaged, lead them to the idea/concept, but let them be the first to say it
• Don't try to "sell it" all at once. Plant seeds, ask questions, make observations, plant another few seeds, etc.
• Be ready to respond, with personal examples whenever possible, to the inevitable comments like "That sounds cool, but we couldn't do that because..."

-- Scott Barber Chief Technologist CEO & President PerfTestPlus, Inc. sbarber@perftestplus.com http://www.perftestplus.com