Inspirations: What Tester can learn from Musican

The Obvious.

A statement that Communication is important in Agile at this point can be treated as an axiom.  So I won’t explain it.

But this mini-series is all about getting inspiration from outside of testing. So I would like to start with taking a look at Musician working with IT

Introducing Doom Music Master

No Clip is outlet focusing on games Documentaries.  Some time ago they did fantastic series about the creation of new Doom.

But I want to write about his interview with Mick Gordon – men responsible for Doom Soundtrack.

Mick Gordon

One of the questions was:

How does he talk about writing music with a team?  Developer and musicians surely don’t have a lot in common.

And isn’t it simial to what we do? How do we talk with business people, how do we talk with devs?

Creating Common Language

His answer is very simple, sit down and spent some time defining your common language.  All sides need to use same words to describe same meaning. The biggest gap between IT and Business is a different language. IT English vs. Business English, quite often we use the same term do describe different things.

His solution is to take some time upfront and discuss terms what we understand by given term.  As Brilliant, it is, it is not easy. At least not from my experience. Have you ever seen a small child continually asking: Why, why, why?  It is tedious.  And asking them to explain what they mean by, in their opinion a clear term, is as tedious to them.

Plus we all get impatient fast; both sides want to start discussing actual features.  But Mick is also presenting us with the solution. He makes the meeting with only one subject on the agenda: Define Language. And this is the best option, finding time will be hard, and same goes for keeping the meeting focused. But the result is well worth the effort.

What happens when we don’t have a common language?

„If there is any ambiguity behind the conversation, 18 months later, when you got no time left, you’re going to run into all sorts of troubles.”

And I do agree, granted Agile medicate some of the problems by having regular demos. But it still can help avoid wasted effort.

Inspiration comes in many forms. Sometimes it is an interview with musician sometimes it is our experience in the diffrent field.

The friend of mine said that masters usually look for a tool to improve their craft outside of their school.

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