Becky is a Software Tester with maybe 15 years testing experience, so you think she’d know what she is doing.
When I was a Tester, I quickly learned what the developers wanted in order to help you. The Message and Stack Trace is mandatory if the software crashed, but it’s always great if you can explain what you were trying to do to “set the scene”:
- What you expected to happen,
- and what actually happened.
Then, if possible, state specific steps to consistently recreate the issue. This is what Developers need to fix a bug, but the same information is great if you want help after failing to configure a server/feature etc.
In this situation, Becky had what sounded like a straight-forward task, and under normal circumstances, you could just log in to the software, fill in a few fields and click save.
She posts on Slack for help, and states she thought this task would be simple but it’s “not the case”. Then says with “Alan’s help, I’ve changed a config file”, and she was trying to use a configuration program but was “unable to connect”.
I’m reading her message and thinking “why has she changed this config file?”, and “what has the connection error got to do with anything else she said in the message?”. She should be able to do all this using our software.
So I message Alan to translate what she said. He did explain it wasn’t that simple, and so they were doing this configuration an alternative way. He said the current problem was just connecting to the server, and he had told her to log a ticket with the Networks team. He said after that, he would carry on helping her.
So I reply to her message on Slack, stating that Alan is still helping her.
She then says that she “knows there is knowledge within the team and didn’t want to take up any more of Alan’s time”.
I thought she was just wasting other people’s time by trying to get other people unnecessarily involved. Alan had helped until this blocking issue occurred; which Becky needed to get the Network’s team to sort out. There’s no point wasting other people’s time.
Since I had already invested some time into it, I decided to ask her some questions. I wanted to know the IP address of the server she was having trouble with, the IP address of the system she was initially configuring, and a database ID so I could actually see if she had the data in the correct tables.
She only answered 1 of my questions, and her response was a slight rephrasing of the thing I questioned. So she wants help, but won’t give me the info in order to actually help. At no point did she say that Alan had instructed her to log a ticket, so she wasn’t even following what Alan told her.
I find that there are a lot of Software Testers that fail to give you enough information to do your job. Somehow they think you can magically work out what they intended to do, and work out what the problem is with barely any information.
Stranger Coding Tings 