Testing and Team Effectiveness

My model of effectiveness focuses on three questions:

• What results do we want to create?
• What results are we observing?
• What can we do to create the results we want?

Often I’m focused on a single person, the person I’m coaching. When I’m working with a team, another question becomes important: What are the similarities and differences among different people’s answers to these questions?

When testers test, they observe things that others have not yet observed. So different people now have different answers to the second question, about observations.

At the risk of floating away into the metaverse, we can now ask some new questions:

• What do different people’s responses to test observations tell you about their answers to the three questions?
• What do the responses tell you about the differences and similarities in the answers?
• What are the implications of these similarities and differences for the team?