Three communication approaches to brilliant clarity

Summary

This is the second article in the series of twelve articles “XII Perspectives to High Performance QA”, outlining interesting & counter intuitive perspectives to high performance QA aligned on four themes of Language, Thinking, Structure & Doing.

In this article under the ‘LANGUAGE’ theme we examine how communication approaches augment the language elements (the subject of prior article) and enables a mindset of brilliant clarity to facilitate high performance QA. Here I outline three communication approaches of storytelling(descriptive), rules/criteria(prescriptive) and visual that play a key role in the activities we do as a producer of brilliant code, from the QA angle.

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The background

Testing is interesting as it is unbounded. Customer needs & expectations are not always known completely, also changing/expanding, technology evolving continually and release cycle speeding up. A nimble process model with great technology helps, once the problem is well analysed. great solution synthesised and then implemented well. What does it take to analyse a problem well, synthesise a great solution and implement well?

Great clarity is an outcome of effective communication approach

In the previous article we saw how sentence TYPES, sentence CONSTRUCTS and language STYLES can help in the problem solving activities to brilliant code. A certain language combination of TYPES, CONSTRUCTS, STYLES enables an activity to be done well. In this article we examine another aspect of language “the communication APPROACH” that builds upon the STYLES, TYPES & CONSTRUCTS to come up with various communication approaches like Storytelling, Rules, Graphical and Visual. What approach is good depends on the activity in the problem solving phases of problem analysis, solution synthesis and implementation management. Let us examine these in detail.

Problem ANALYSIS Phase- DESCRIPTIVE approach

The prerequisite to good problem analysis is a clear and deep understanding of the problem. Now, how do we understand something well? Remember when we were young, we were told stories to help understand good/evil, right/wrong etc. Story telling aids understanding. Story telling is describing something in an interesting fashion, of connecting various elements in an engaging manner, with a human touch. And that is possibly why we relate to a story better rather than mere facts, enabling good understanding and fostering interesting questions to deepen the same. Describing the elements and connecting these enables us to come up with interesting questions and attempting to answer these help us to understand better. This is what I term as ‘DESCRIPTIVE approach’.

In (1) Understanding, we attempt to understand a system by reading the specification or ‘playing’ with a prior version of the system. The act of writing ‘user stories’ is to describe as what the system should do as a simple story. A typical specification could be dry and boring, the trick is to attach a human touch i.e who (person or another system). The key aspects that we connect are who uses this, why do they want it, what do they value, when do they use it, how frequently do they use it, how do they intend to use it. Keeping the storytelling angle, and starting from the ‘who’ and looking at the various elements allows us to describe the system and therefore come up with questions.

In (2) Analysis & Simplification the storytelling approach eases the identification of various persona, various elements to test, attributes to satisfy , environments of consideration and stage of development (new/modified).

Solution SYNTHESIS — PRESCRIPTIVE approach

Now let us shift to how we possibly discover solutions to problems. What is a solution? — A set of rules to follow to solve, a ‘prescription’ that we can follow. Synthesising a solution requires us to understand the various conditions that relate to the problem and therefore a combination of these conditions is the ‘prescription’ to follow. Focusing on a ‘prescriptive approach’ enables us to extract conditions and formulate the solution.The synthesised solution is expected to be clear, unambiguous, precise i.e ‘objective’, while problem analysis is aided by a descriptive approach that is ‘subjective’.

In (3) Goal setting and planning, prescriptive approach is useful to identify clear and precise acceptance criteria that is indeed testable. In (4) Designing, it is about extracting the various conditions that govern the intended behaviour. Describing how it works/intended-to-work allows to understand and identify the conditions — ‘descriptive approach’, which may be part of (2) a deep dive into the entities to test. Once we identify the conditions, the solution of designing test scenarios to evaluate the product is of ‘stringing the conditions’ to result in scenarios to evaluate i.e prescription. Note that this is applicable to design of functional or non-functional test scenarios.

Implementation MANAGEMENT — VISUAL approach

When we run the scenarios and generate test data, what may be a suitable approach for managing the implementation well? Given that this phase generates a lot of data on activities done and outcomes achieved, it is only natural to take a visual approach to reporting and analysis of this. The visual approach may be structured graphs coupled with unstructured pictorials to break the monotony and communicate better. Now dry reporting using visuals may be augmented with a descriptive approach i.e. storytelling to convey results/outcomes better so as to enable effective management.

In this phase the key activities are (5) Execution & Reporting and (6) Analysis & Retrospecting. When we report progress, quality or delivery risk, it is common to report using visual aids like graphical charts. Well, when reports are dry numbers and charts, it is sometimes hard to discern if it is good or bad. Coupled with a prescriptive approach of stating the limits enables one to infer goodness. Also telling a story using the data expands understanding and aids in superior management.

Summary

Clarity is often a reflection of the mind and great clarity implies an uncluttered mind. The style & structure of sentence matters to the way we think, understand, design, act and analyse. How we string the sentences and communicate is key to seeing everything and spotting the missing.

A judicious mix of unstructured human friendly(descriptive) storytelling approach with structured action oriented prescriptive (rule/criteria based) approach and fact-rich visual approach expands the cognitive abilities enabling us to see the expansive full picture and also allowing us to swoop down as necessary.

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“High performance thinking using the power of language”.

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“To express well, choose the right medium”.