Collaboration Techniques: Combining New Approaches with Ancient Wisdom

In our increasingly agile world, the new buzzword is collaboration—so easy to preach but difficult to do well. Testers are challenged to work directly, effectively, efficiently, and productively with customers, programmers, business analysts, writers, trainers, and pretty much everyone in the business value chain. Many points of collaboration exist: grooming stories with customers, sprint planning with team members, reviewing user interaction with customers, troubleshooting bugs with developers, whiteboarding with peers, and buddy checking. Rob Sabourin and Dot Graham examine what collaboration is, why it is challenging, and how you can do it better. Join Rob and Dot to learn about forgotten but proven techniques, such as risk-based objectives, checklists, entry and exit criteria, diverse roles, cross-checking, and root cause analysis. These techniques can help you work more efficiently, improve your professional relationships, and deliver quality products. Bring your own stories of collaboration—good and bad—and see how forgotten wisdom can help improve today’s practices.