Our words create orientation or can make someone feel like they stepped into a rabbit hole and have no idea how they got there. Alice in Wonderland work edition. I shared what happened with the Scrum of Scrum's meeting and how lost I was, but let me tell you about the end-to-end testing and how I turned some people's expectations upside down. All my fault.
I have been working on a project across teams, and there is a part that in theory works, but I personally don't believe it until I see it. So I asked my team members to set up a working session with the different groups to test it so I could finally see it working. Because if I don't see it, it's not true, it's not proven, and I don't believe it until I see it. And also the other goal was as they were working through, they could fix any issues that could come up.
And since they're together, they know exactly where they stand. However, a status meeting came up before the working session. And in the status mission, if it does feel like a mission, in the status meeting, the question was raised, can we get some dates as to when the project is going to be complete? However, I could not give some dates until the working session happened, because that's when we would all finally be on the same page and realize what actually was missing as we would all be together and finally go step by step.
So I told the group, hey, we have a working session on this day, at this time, and we're going to go through end-to-end testing. And that's where I made the mistake. I set end-to-end testing. And some of the people there, that was not a good word to use, I changed the orientation for them.
I put some pressure on some of the teams, because they were not ready for end-to-end testing. They had not finished developing, which is totally understandable, because that was not their timeline. And one of the things is, I was not in constant communication with them. So when I use end-to-end testing, they did not understand what I meant.
Unlike my team, who I speak to every day constantly, I'm in constant communication with them. I explained to them that for me end-to-end testing just meant going through the motions of the project for our piece and seeing the process complete. And if we encountered any errors, we could fix those. But at least we knew where we would stand.
However, right, the other team was unaware about what I meant, so I unintentionally gave them whiplash. Therefore, I have decided, going forward, I will no longer use the words end-to-end testing. I'm just going to call it progressive testing, and that is going to mean, to see how far we get until one day we reach the end. So no completion date is just until one day we reach the end, and therefore, less pressure right, and no more whiplash, hopefully.
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