Peter Sawyer, Software Quality Analyst III
In the SQA world, a large part of what we do is identifying, documenting, and preventing risk. What if we did this but didn’t communicate that risk to developers, leaders, or stakeholders? Finding a defect doesn’t do anyone any good if no one else knows about it.
Once risks are identified, effective communication is essential for successful risk management. Transparency and open communication ensure that all relevant parties are aware of potential pitfalls so they can work collaboratively to address them. Clear and transparent communication helps by:
- Creating Awareness: Communicating risks creates awareness among team members, stakeholders, and leadership about potential obstacles that may impact the end user. This allows for proactive – rather than reactive – planning and mitigation strategies.
- Facilitating Collaboration: When people are informed of risks, they can collaborate to develop effective mitigation strategies.
- Aligning Expectations: Effective communication helps set realistic expectations regarding the availability of features and functionality and a deeper understanding of why a feature may take longer than expected for completion.
- Improving Decision-Making: With communication, Leadership and Product Owners can make better decisions about project-wide changes and feature priorities. More information provides more insight and a greater ability to adjust timelines, allocate additional resources, and revise goals, etc., which helps diminish risks.
- Building Trust: Transparency in communication builds trust. Period. Open communication about risks fosters a positive and collaborative team environment.
In our line of work, effective communication is imperative to delivering applications with built-in quality and with less risk, and it helps contribute to the overall success of the whole team.