Applying Emotional Intelligence to Testing

Did you face the following situations in you career?

 In regression(last round of) testing stage, you logged a defect and developer did not consider it for this release. Same defect raised by the customer after releasing the product/project. Higher management asks you like "Why you did not communicate with us regarding this defect before release?". How do you answer this question?

Another situation like, your manager asked you to test/automate a feature. You analysed the feature and came up with three weeks schedule. Your manager accepts it and after one day he changes time from three weeks to one week. How do you handle this situation?

In both cases what actually upsets you? How do you actually communicate back in the right way?

You need to understand where another person is coming from. So that you communicate well. If you keep talking about test cases, they don't care.

Emotional intelligence is understanding what triggers you in terms of emotions, and then how you handle those emotions

A lot of testers focus on their technical skills and they learn lot tools and techniques.But they don't concentrate on communication skills.

 “Information and communication are two words that are interchangeably used, but mean very different things—information is giving out and communication is getting through,” - a quote by Sidney Harris 

We provide information for people to make those decisions, but it's the communication aspect that actually determines how successful we are.

We're distracted. We should listen with our eyes.

There was a young boy with father at the breakfast table and he says, “Daddy, I want to read to you,” and the father is there with the newspaper and he says, “Yes, I'm listening, dear” and he says, “No, no, Daddy, Daddy. I want to read to you, please listen to me.” Father says, with the newspaper, “I'm listening.” The child gets up from the table, pulls the newspaper down and says, “Silly daddy, you need to listen with your eyes.”

We're very distracted, and we're not always actively listening because we're inside our phone or we're thinking about what we have to do next. We get so caught up in all of our things in our heads even that we aren't present all the time