Your Recipe for Suck Less

In Cindy Lawless's keynote at CAST 2022 we spent a few minutes testing a simple application as a group and then collaborated on a test report.

The report was the kind of thing a team lead might be expected to provide to management before a software release in a traditional software shop but, with Cindy's guidance, we avoided dumb artefact counts, meaningless charts, and level-of-effort analysis rather than risk analysis.

Cindy's report recipe is straightforward: summary, strategy, coverage, risks, bugs and other concerns.

She gave a nice summary of how this can be a simple and clean Slack message rather than the cumbersome slide deck that is often requested, and copy-pasted, although we did build a deck in the session.

I think there are a handful of key points to take away:

Management won't read it (all). Make the important stuff is concise, clear, and prominent.
The important stuff is what's important to them. What could affect business value?
Don't let the report be a surprise. Have conversations that need having before you circulate it.

But, interestingly, my favourite part of the session was the flowchart you can see at the top of the sketchnotes. It reflects my reporting reality much more closely these days.

As I iterate in my work, I might be expected to summarise status (product and testing) at any time, and often verbally. For this, I like to use a version of the testing story format that I first saw in Rapid Software Testing a long time ago:

What I did.
What I found.
Risk and value.

All three will be context-dependent: who I'm talking to, about what, what's changed since last time we spoke, what I know their historical interests are, what other issues there are around the product, and so on.

If I need to write a report I'll structure it for the audience and topic but it'll usually start with why there is a report and a summary of the outcome, then have sections for whatever details are relevant.

In fact, this is also the structure of my test notes. And that's not a coincidence.

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