Leverage Your Data to Establish Credibility as a Tester or Developer
Whether you’re in development, testing, QA, or any other compartment of software, it can be difficult to find the courage and right opportunity to speak up and thrive in an environment where you’re surrounded by other experts in the field.
If you’re new to a team but have an important point to make during a meeting, it makes sense to just voice your opinion and get your message across, right? That’s easier said than done. It takes time to build credibility amongst your peers, so if you intend to be the voice of reason and present your ideas, you need to back everything up with data.
In today’s social media age, concise, researched points are at a premium. Plenty of people see a statement, quote, or article floating around Facebook or Twitter and just assume it’s Bible—without any real credible sources or explicit information to back it up. According to Melissa Benua, a senior backend engineer for PlayFab, data is king when you’re trying to get your point across in a software team.
“Use your data. Before you go into any meeting and have to persuade somebody verbally, see if you can have all your ducks in a row,” Benua told StickyMinds. “Say, rather than I think that or I feel that, say, ‘This data shows from the run that I did last week that 33 percent of our users are leaving this page after eight seconds, or have a very short dwell time. I think this metric feeds into this other metric which feeds into this other metric.’
“People are much more likely to take you seriously if you have some data backing that they can relate to because your communication styles may be different, but everybody...We're generally all engineers and we generally all understand data and metrics and what the actual impact is.”
So many arguments can be shut down with the simple request of “show me the data.” If you walk into a situation with data in hand, a game plan in mind, and a list of all the benefits that could come from your idea, you’re already starting with rock solid footing.
Change can be difficult to communicate—especially if you’re a new member of a team. Why change the way things are being done if it’s worked this well for so long? However, if you can present the right data to your software team and explain why your idea—whether it be related to agile, DevOps, IoT, or just a better testing method—will improve product quality or reduce cost, you’ll quickly gain credibility amongst your peers.
