As IT practitioners we can find that our messages are not heard or are misinterpreted. Sometimes we do not hear the messages other people need to tell us. Our natural abilities at storytelling and at appreciating the stories others tell us can be crushed under the weight of the ways we are expected to plan, report and communicate about testing and quality. Isabel examines our natural ability to tell stories and our natural delight in narrative, which help us communicate about testing and quality to others in our organisations. We look at why and how we tell stories in a way that is appealing to our audience. That means thinking about the role of oral, written and pictorial representations of testing stories, using the analogies of novels, short stories, picture books, poems and songs. You need a variety of story formats work best for your testing messages and how to adapt your testing stories to your audience. We also examine how we can better listen to other people’s stories about their parts of the project, about quality and about testing, and how we need to adapt our listening style to different storytellers when we are the audience.

Influence diagrams provide a simple-to-create and easy-to-understand approach to addressing the complexities of real-life problems.  For instance, as testers we may want to find more bugs, but what is the knock-on effect of this on the developers?  Developers now have more defects to debug affecting their capacity to deliver new functionality.  Influence diagrams provide a means of understanding and managing the complexities of those key interactions between testers, developers and the business. Over the last few years, Isabel has used influence diagrams as a practical tool to analyse the causes of problems and help identify potential solutions. In this practical workshop, with hands-on activities, Isabel helps you construct and interpret influence diagrams, to illustrate typical problems and solutions in testing projects, and in the interactions between the business, testers and developers. Using just pen and paper (along with plenty of discussion) we analyse example problems and identify potential solutions. Be able to build and understand how to use simple influence diagrams in your day-to-day work.  Take-away: example influence diagrams that illustrate a number of different IT delivery and testing situations.