Telling Our Testing Stories
As software practitioners focus on technology issues, we often find that our messages to management and the business are either not heard or are misinterpreted. And sometimes we do not hear the messages that they need us to hear. Isabel Evans examines our natural ability to tell stories and how everyone’s built-in receptiveness to narratives will help you communicate productively about testing and quality. Isabel looks at how we can tell our testing stories in a way that is appealing to our audience. That means thinking about the role of oral, written, and visual representations of testing stories and practicing communicating through the analogies of novels, short stories, picture books, poems, and songs. Because we will need a variety of story formats for our testing messages to work best, Isabel shares how to adapt testing stories to different audiences. Learn how we can better listen to other people’s stories and adapt our listening style to different storytellers.
Independent quality and testing consultant Isabel Evans has more than thirty years of IT experience in quality management and testing in the financial, communications, and software sectors. Her quality management work focuses on encouraging IT teams and customers to work together via flexible processes designed and tailored by the teams that use them. Isabel authored Achieving Software Quality Through Teamwork and chapters in Agile Testing: How to Succeed in an eXtreme Testing Environment; The Testing Practitioner; and Foundations of Software Testing. A popular speaker at software conferences worldwide, Isabel is a Chartered IT Professional and Fellow of the British Computer Society, and has been a member of software industry improvement working groups.