Three months ago I started a new job, I´m now a consultant at Agile Partner. No more test project management, no more team leading: in my actual project I´m a team member in an agile development team, that´s using scrum; of course with the main focus on testing, but not only testing.
I had a lot of Aha-experiences during that 3 months already, mainly in the areas of collaboration, communication and wokring together. Not in the sense of that all of this is better just by „being agile“, I think in every work environment, this should be the common core how humans work together. Anyway, let me tell me what happened today, that was quite impressive to me:
A while ago, I retested a defect from the bug tracker, which had the state „resolved“. I found out, that in general the defect was solved, but also found a special corner case, where the wrong behaviour still occured. So I added a comment to the defect, where I described that special corner case, and sent the bug back to the developer who had set it to „resolved“. Now this guy came to my desk, asking me to explain my comment, since he couldn´t reproduce it. So I opened the bug in the bugtracker, and we both discussed the defect and the comment, to go sure we had the same understanding of it. Then we started the test system, trying to reproduce that special corner case. It turned out, that I wasn´t precise enough when re-testing the bug the first time, so my description of the corner case was too general, so the bug only appeared in a special corner in that corner case. Anyway… we agreed on, that there´s still some development-work to be done, and the developer is now going to do that. It was a matter of less then 5 minutes to discuss, re-test, find out and agree on, and I think this is, how it should be.
From my experiences at earlier jobs/ projects, I can say that 90% of the developers I worked with so far would have set the defect to „waste“, maybe some of them would have added „not reproducable“ as a comment in the bug tracker; but most of them wouldn´t have contacted me (no matter of personally or via phone or email, or even via the bug tracker). Maybe it´s just my unlucky experience that I had to work with so many developers of that kind, but I have the impression this shaped me a lot, and that´s why I was (and still am) so impressed about developers that are searching for communication with their team mates (testers) to understand what they are talking about.
I mean, in any case we are working together to develop one product to satisfy our customer(s). What do I win if I reject that re-opened defect? Or do developers assume tester´s submit/ re-open defects just to punish developers? No! They do that, to deliver a bug-free product to the customer. Why is it so often that (not)-good-old „they-against-us“-game? Why is it so hard to understand that it is „us“?