It really should be all about the customer
by Samir Shah • July 25, 2012 • Events, Zephyr Enterprise Edition • 2 Comments
As a bunch of us milled around at the end of the CAST 2012 conference held recently in San Jose, CA, a discussion broke out on what the major themes of this year’s event were. A number of well-articulated ideas were thrown around but the uneasiness that I had experienced through the entire event finally gave shape to what it was that bothered nay, dismayed me.
We were still discussing the same things that we did 20 years ago.
It was the same discussion about how to improve tester-developer relationships, and how to get developers to think more like testers and whether testers should be doing more automation development or <add_new_flavor_of_testing_here>. While I agree that some of the underlying issues haven’t changed (we are human after all), a significant amount of change has occurred around us that necessitates some introspection and rising above some of these (IMHO, less important) issues.
In the end, it should be all about the customer. The user. The end-user. The buyer. Anyone who is going to be using the software we have built and tested. It’s not about inter-personal relationships. It’s not about finding fault in someone’s code or someone’s interpretation of what your software should or should not do. It’s not about egos.
And I didn’t hear that. Not in a single session, discussion, workshop or keynote. While the entire body discussed what the characteristics of “The Thinking Tester” were, not one mention was made about anything customer-facing. We talked about processes and tools and methods and metrics and relationships galore. Those might be important to some folks but at the end of the day, I reiterate, it’s about the customer. We should be thinking about the customer above all else and asking simple and fundamental questions, and then patterning our daily work, processes, relationships and interactions based on them.
So ask yourself these questions:
- Who is my customer?
- Is this what the customer would want?
- Is this what they’d like?
- Will this make a difference to them?
- Will this cause them anguish?
- Are we doing right by this customer?
And let me know if this fundamentally changes the way you look at developing and testing software and helps you produce a better quality product that is useful, relevant and delights your customer.
Hi Samir,
So you didn’t hear one conversation about the customer. Fair enough. I heard several. Hang out with Scott Barber. He talks about value to the customer quite a bit. He’s not the only one.
The theme of the conference was tester-centric (The thinking tester’), so it should hardly be surprising that this is where the focus was. As for discussion, did you ask the presenters any questions about customer focus (either during or after the presentation)? Did you go to the test lab and talk to people there about how testing relates to the customer? Did you start conversations with new people about it? It sounds like it might have been an interesting discussion. You get out of these events what you put in.
‘It’s all about the customer’? I think that’s a convenient oversimplification to enable your rant. The customer is certainly worthy of careful consideration, but the customer is not always the end user, or perhaps I should say not always the end user alone. Testers can have many different customers depending on who they serve. For me, testing generally comes down to ‘whom do I serve’, ‘what do they want/need to know’. I consider those people my customer. Does that mean I ignore the end user? No. I often act as a representative for the end user, especially if I don’t have access to actual end users for their input.
You say ‘it’ is not about inter-personal relationships. Assuming that by ‘it’ you mean software development, I’d have to disagree. It is very much about inter-personal relationships. I think by and large we do tend to be focused on what the end user wants and because human communication in its various media, is imperfect, we end up discussing the ways in which we can make communication clearer, ways we can become more effective at delivering value software. Not discussing the end user is not the same as neglecting the end user.
‘Our customer’ is a rich area for discussion, and a conversation worth having, but testing and indeed software testing in general is a more complex beast than that alone. Time, budget, the skill of your team, the knowledge of the product owner, their clarity of vision, their ability to communicate it, current events of the industry you work in and so on – all quite relevant to software development and software testing and no less worthy of discussion. I would suggest you don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater because you didn’t hear what you wanted.
Samir, I may not be the right person to answer this (and as I’m a member of AST’s board, I might have tio recuse myself from this discussion) but I think you are wrong to say that NO talks or discussions were about delivering value to the customer. I say this because my talk, which was about balancing ATDD, GUI automation and Exploratory Testing, was specifically aimed at getting to the heart of what was needed, which was delivering true business value to our customers and stakeholders, and using all of the techniques we have at our disposal to do that.
Yes, we discuss a fair amount about tools and processes and metrics, because that’s the reality of the work that many of us do and the organizations we work with. Still, even within those realities, at the end of the day, the need to deliver a product that works for the customer and gets them to be successful *is* the end goal, and delivering real business value is our goal. That was one of the key takeaways I hoped that people would walk away from my talk with.