I had to go back to May 11 to find a testing podcast in my subscription list that I hadn't listened to already: The lucky podcast is The Testing Show: Testing in the Broader Picture.
It's 30 minutes of discussion on the role of testing. The discussion meandered into many different areas...shifting left, the history of testing as a separate role in an organization, and being "in the room". A lot of times we're viewed as the killjoy in the room if we're invited to high level strategy meetings...we burst the bubbles of those who want to do something and in a specific way. Despite saving companies millions in time and infrastructure costs of pursuing a project we see heading for failure, we can be seen as mean, which makes us less likely to be invited to future meetings. So choose your words carefully and offer alternatives rather than something along the lines of "this idea is stupid and you're stupid".
Fits in nicely with a blog post I read this morning about using our words carefully and powerfully: Verbal Aikido for Product Managers. The post includes the Winston Churchill quote "Diplomacy is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions". Diplomatically steering people away from bad decisions and toward good ones is an important software testing skill.
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