I had offered to emergency-GM for an L5R group (Heroes of Rokugan, if you feel so inclined to check it out). Long story short, the game ended up not happening due to the bad timing of trying to find a GM at the last moment, and having two players in South Korea.
What happened next, however, was a fun comedy of errors.
I had started off an email thread to get things rolling, including all of the players, as well as the three GMs who were generally free, including myself as (what I thought) was an alternate in case they needed me.
One of the organizers trimmed the list back to just myself and the players, without explicitly telling me she was doing so (I found out later that the other GMs had contacted her, with no one passing along the information to me).
This went to the day before the game with me innocently asking who the GM was, and finding out it was me. Unfortunately, I had already made plans (seeing as no one had actually asked me to GM, and I wasn't their regular one).
Had either I said that I needed to be asked to GM, or someone had explicitly asked me to GM, things would have worked out okay.
So, how does this apply to testing? In a few ways:
- I am sometimes bad about being explicit in my speech and writing. I tend to assume people already know what I'm talking about. It's one of the habits I am trying to work myself out of.
- Tests should make clear what they are testing. Tests shouldn't be left floating with no clear connection to their requirements. Without some good connection to the requirements, it is hard to keep the test maintainable...as new testers have to work harder to find out what a test does, what requirement it covers, and how thorough it is. Good, descriptive comments and logs go a long way.
So, how about you, any bad experiences due to poor or implicit communication?
No comments:
Post a Comment