Testing In The Dark:

Lessons in Cross-Site CommunicationNeil Studd, Amido

About Me (and my teams)

• Worked with teams around the world• West: USA (Los Angeles, San Diego)

• Europe: Croatia, Germany, other UK remote-workers

• East: India, Malaysia

• Also been a remote worker occasionally myself

• Recurring, non-company-specific issues in these situations

What goes wrong?

• Misunderstood messages• Loss of meaning (“crossed wires”)

• Ambiguity of language (reduced nuance)

• Uncertainty of whether anyone’s there

• Unpredictability of response time

• Generally taking longer to achieve the same thing

• For me, a worse communication experience than face-to-face

Why might remote communication be harder?

• Removing the visual, and often also the audio

• Higher interaction cost for beginning a new conversation• Face-to-face = you just start talking

• Telephone = initiating a request to talk

• Video conference = finding a time when suitable, presentability concerns

• Non-native speakers: less time to react in real-time conversation

• Some people like the boundary walls which are created by distance

• So when you’re just left with words, how much meaning is left

Albert Mehrabian: “7% - 38% - 55% rule”

• Silent Messages (1971)

• Face-to-face, one-to-one exchanges conveying a feeling/attitude

• How we weigh our liking of a person• 7% words

• 38% tone of voice

• 55% facial expression

• To maximise “liking”, all 3 parts must be congruent (no mixed messages)

Mehrabian’s research: Often overgeneralised

• “55% of messages received and processed by your brain are based on your body language…”

• “38% of messages are processed based on your tone of voice…”

• “Only 7% of your received meaning will be based off the words you are saying…”

https://www.accuconference.com/resources/non-verbal-communication.html

Albert Mehrabian: Implications of generalising

• Do you understand 93% of a foreign speaker’s message, just by looking at them?

• Do you understand 55% of a speech when it’s on mute?

• Is IM only 7% as effective as face-to-face communication?

You can overcome the lack of visibility…

• Words matter, more than many would have you believe!

• But there’s more to communication than just interpreting words.

• Looking more closely at email & instant messaging

My gripes with email and IM communication

• Uncertainty about when message is received

• Overcompensating for the above: read receipts!

• Getting stuck in large distribution lists/chains

• Difficult for people to track several distinct points in one discussion

• Emoticons/smilies are poor substitute for visual cues :/

• Nuances, turn-of-phrase, sarcasm: all evaporate (Poe’s Law)

• If there are language barriers: reduced opportunity for clarification/correction

How I handle email and IM communication

• Avoid them; favour real-time method

• When I have to use them:• IM for a quick response to a simple question

• Email if I want to summarise more complex information

• Email: “Inbox Zero”

• Filters and Rules

• Try to communicate urgency (or non-urgency)

Email/IM tips from Karen Johnson at TestBash

• Use same language/style as your speech

• Open with a personal anecdote

• Help understand the pressures/events in your office (the “why”)

• In other words, give context which the medium otherwise omits

• Give examples of helpful answers

• Share profile pages

Communicating across timezones

• Delay in message delivery/receipt

• Can take days to exchange basic information; more with each additional back-and-forth

• Each additional bit of information adds complexity and reduces chance of getting all points addressed

Communicating locally…

• “Has build 52 been deployed to the test environment?”

• “Which test environment do you mean?”

• “Sorry, I didn’t realise there were several. I’m using UAT-3.”

• “OK – yes, I deployed there this morning.”

Time to communicate: 10s (spoken) to 30s (typed in IM)

Communicating to Malaysia…

• THU: 10am BST / 5pm MYT“Has build 52 been deployed to the test environment?”

• FRI: 1am BST / 8am MYT“Which test environment do you mean?”

• FRI: 8.30am BST / 3.30pm MYT“Sorry, I didn’t realise there were several. I’m using UAT-3.”

• FRI: 9.30am BST / 4.30pm MYT“Actually we’ve done build 53 today. I can revert to build 52 on Monday if you need?”

Time to communicate: 24 hours, potentially more

Improving cross-timezone communication

• Focus on eliminating the lag in communication:• Know when your working hours overlap (World Chat Clock)

• Keep these times free for cross-site discussions/standups

• Information radiators (no need to ask “is build 52 ready for testing?”)• Dashboards (but watch out for “data puke”!)

• Kanban board: Trello

• Collaboration tools: Hackpad, Evernote, OneNote

WorldChatClock.com

Conference calls: Meeting without seeing

• Technology ramp-up: The start time is never the start

• Disconnections/connection issues which disrupt the call

• Lag producing the overlapping communication spiral

• Balancing background noise vs muted participants

• Mixed degrees of attention (or, in my experience, ridicule)

Isn't there a better way?

Meeting costs increase with # of attendees

http://tobytripp.github.io/meeting-ticker/

Conference, 90 people, guessing £100ph rate for each. After 45 mins:

How I handle… Conference calls

• Er, don’t do them?

• Videoconferencing can help (if latency/quality is good)

• Or 1-2-1 video chat (Skype etc)

• There are better ways to have productive group discussions

One productivity tool to rule them all?

Sqwiggle

• Tap thumbnail(s) for video chat

• Visual presence, not just “Busy/Away”

• Intrusive/weird at first

• “Now I can’t code in my pyjamas?!”

• You get used to it

• Requires team buy-in

(Plus everything else you’d expect: text chat, file sharing, tool integration)

One productivity tool to rule them all?

Slack

• Meaty chat app

• Quick, deep searching

• Potential email replacement

• Tool integration

• Range of platforms/apps

• Don’t mention the hack

(It does this better than Sqwiggle, but lacks equivalent webcam integration)

Honourable mention: HipChat, mature but not quite as dynamic as Slack

Thanks for your time!

Any questions?