Communication in Testing: Improvements for Testing Management

Testing in companies with highly competitive environments has many opportunities and challenges. Testing is diversified, both contextually and geographically: there are many testing goals, many ongoing parallel projects, many testing phases and all this needs to be managed so that the full view of testing is visible for management and reporting. Testing is also linked to project communication and psychology: communication needs to be constructive, and testers and test leaders should have good interpersonal skills. It really does matter how a failure or test report is formulated. In order to localize testing problems in a large software-intensive company, we conducted a current state analysis via web-based questionnaire among experienced testing practitioners, most having at least 5 years experience in these tasks. The scope of the survey was decided to keep broad with the goal of finding future improvements within tool, process and method development. In this paper, we will concentrate on those survey results that have psychological underlying. Based on the results, we suggest a set of improvements for testing and, especially, test reporting. Implementation of these improvements is still underway, but the findings and suggestions provide insight into psychology of testing.