Implementing Change - MoT Bloggers Club August 2021

Change is always hard. Humans are creatures of habit, we feel comfortable and safe when we are operating within our established (predictable) patterns. That is why people resist changes, even the ones that are good for them! Getting someone to accept that a change is needed can be tricky, it will generally involve analyzing the situations and doing some persuading. If you can convince others that a certain change will bring them a certain kind of tangible benefit, people will be more open to accepting it. So let's see how would that look in terms of software testing! 

As testers we often are arguing for more resources for testing, more time, trying to convince the management to give us the blessing to do more automation, to try out new approaches to testing, and to implement improvements to our testing process. So let's say we propose to change the testing process in our company, how would we go about implementing those changes?

Assess the Situation

First of all, get to know the people and the product. Going in blindly, and trying to enforce changes (even if they are for the better) is never a good idea. In order to propose changes, it is good to analyze how they have been doing things so far, so you can recognize potential areas of improvement and compare the current state to how it could be done. After that do a presentation of proposed improvements/changes, keep it as hands-on as possible.

Do Some Convincing

You might have to do some sales-person role-playing here, try to convince people that the changes you are proposing will make their work easier, more productive and that they will bring them some concrete benefit. Convincing people that change will make their day-to-day tasks easier will get you a long way to have the changes accepted, try to do a practical demonstration. Here is a real-world example from my experience: I was on a project where they had no way of managing their test, they would just write them in Excel, I advised them to try a test management plugin for Jira so they can have their test cases link to their User Stories. This improved the visibility of the testing process and save some time for the testers in the longs run - a simple example, yet it's important to demo things.

Gradually Introduce Changes

After getting the people on board with your proposed changes it's time to gently implement them. If it's at all possible, avoid introducing major changes at once, but rather in small increments. Think about this in terms of release to production a big release with tons of new features will be more likely to cause unexpected problems, but, deploying small changes, one at a time, will reduce the scope of the potential risk and also make it easier to do a roll-back if something goes wrong. Pretty much the same goes for implementing process or organization changes, a small change is easier for people to deal with and it if proves like it's heading in the wrong direction you can just decide not to implement it, no harm done.

Our mind is trying to protect us from change, amygdala (part of our brain) sees changes as threats and releases hormones that make us feel, angry, afraid, or uneasy. To "trick" our lizard brain into accepting changes we need to explain the reasons behind the need for implementing the change, get people involved, and be open to feedback, commit to implementing the change, demonstrate the need with practical actions, and count on the fact that implementing changes takes time!