The day isn’t even half and twice I’ve caused chaos!
This morning I asked the analyst in my team why I got to state A instead of state B as I expected. She was also very confused and embarked on a quest!
First we discussed it among ourselves and decided we didn’t know enough and so we went to one of the developers.
We explained him what was going on and after a short while he just said “I don’t know, ask the other developer.”. And so we did! We started talking to him and saw him panic. He made that change! We we’re on the right track. So after quizzing him on WHY he made the change it turned out that it was never documented. He was told to do it in some call and he just executed it.
Now the analyst got a bit annoyed. She’s supposed to know these kind of changes. She’s the one in charge of keeping the documents up to date. These documents we provide the client so they know how to use the product. So she started grilling the developer on who told him, when and why?
I never intended to make it this big of a deal, I just got confused and asked for more information.
A bit later I was wondering if there might be a problem with indicating which fields have an error. If there was maybe a consistent way we could show the field names instead of the logical names, who can be weird sometimes.
This sparked a pair programming/investigating between two developers to see if there even was a possible solution to my seemingly easy question.
They came up with 3 possible solutions and decided to implement one quick one, and ask the PO later on which will be the permanent one.
I sprinkle chaos in my team.
Not only do I sprinkle chaos but also help my team deal with it.
The analyst was getting lost in how this situation came to be. The developer got a feeling he got the blame for doing his best. The situation was escalating a bit.
I made clear we weren’t looking for somebody to blame, we just want the right information to move forward and prevent this situations. The analyst also needed some help not getting lost in the past, and focus deal with the current situation instead.
Seeing the developers move so easily to a pair session was nice to see, but also distracted them from their daily tasks. I let them work for a while but tried to see if I couldn’t help or maybe should create a task, that we could plan in later instead. So this is what we did once we knew how to deal with the issue.
Being a tester isn’t only about finding issues. It’s about helping your team in any way you can. Even if it’s helping the conversation between to people or keeping them from getting lost in a task.
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