Implementing Emotional Intelligence (EI) in Software Testing? Lets see how!

The first question that comes to mind after reading the title is What is EI and how it is related to Software Testing? So the best answer to the question would be:

Basically, EI is nothing but Emotional Quotient which is the combination of Interpersonal Effectiveness and Intrapersonal Effectiveness.

Fig 1. Emotional Intelligence

According to statistics 58% of our job performance depends on EQ and 90% of high performers have high EQ and they earn approximately 29000$ more annually than the one having low EQ.

Keeping statistics apart, firstly it is necessary to know the basic behavior of testers. The biggest happiness in the life of tester is to break the application or when they find a crash or a bug in an application

On contrary, the developer never wants their application to crash on any condition. But telling somebody officially that he or she is wrong is what the testing is all about.

Testers are the people who like to break things so as to find out the true quality of a product or test the product in the best possible way. Their job requires them to be a pessimist by nature. Their usual frame of mind is that unless they criticize the test item, the quality of the product will not be improved.

Now, you might be thinking that what kind of hook up EI can have with the world of software testing. The answer for this is “A Huge interconnection”. To understand this, let’s try to understand the importance of EI in software profession a bit more.

Daniel Goleman a renowned author and science journalist describes Emotional Intelligence as- “Managing feeling so that they are expressed appropriately and effectively, enabling people to work together smoothly towards their common goals”

Fig 2. Components of Emotional Intelligence

Testers are the people

• who needs to be motivated so as they can learn new technologies
• Who needs to be aware of the recent condition of an application
• Who needs to be calm so that they can communicate with developers without creating any violence.
• Who needs to have always learning and accepting attitude which helps them to listen to others.

So all these are prerequisites for any tester which can be acquired if you have good Emotional Intelligence.

Let’s see how Emotional Intelligence is necessary for a tester by understanding Emotional Intelligence bit more:

Understanding Emotional Effectiveness:

• Self-Awareness- It is needed for accurate self-assessment which in turn is very much needed for a tester
• Motivation- Self-motivation is one of the most important traits that is required in a tester – doing the reiterative task.
• Empathy- It includes Organizational awareness and being compassionate towards work environment.
• Social Skills- It includes building bonds with the team member or developers, teamwork, and collaboration, developing others and inspirational leadership.
• Self Regulation- It includes adaptability in the environment, Initiative to do any testing work, the trustworthiness of your team members.

All of the above qualities are listed as prerequisites for someone who wishes to join the profession of testing fraternity:

Necessity of good EI :

Professionals in the Testing field frequently face challenging situations and scenarios as they work in very uncertain environments, wherein sometimes tests may pass or fail. The tester has to bear the burden of releasing the build and informing the developer about the bug during every release.

One such scenario is :
Testing team is informed about reducing the resource due to reasons like Financial loss of the company or at times of client as well. Recession and Automation replacing manual can be some other reasons too.This results in frustration and creates an atmosphere of unnecessary debates, endless fights, and insignificant meetings.

So in these difficult situations, it is necessary for a tester to have good EQ, that helps him/her to handle such crises calmly and in a best possible way.

For ex. A tester having a good EQ never tells the developer about their mistakes in an informal (publicly, verbal) way, rather he uses the formal way of defect reporting mechanism (Email, Defect tracking tools etc.).

One of the good examples of a person having good EQ is Captain Cool of Indian cricket team i.e Mahendra Singh Dhoni.

He possesses most of the above-mentioned qualities:->

Here are some Tips to improve EI:

There are some methods to improve the EI of an individual:

• Don’t interrupt or change the subject.
• If you don’t know how you’re feeling, ask someone else.
• Ask yourself
• Write thoughts and feelings down.

Last but not the least it is well said that:

“A good IQ can get you a job but a good EQ can get you promoted.”

So here we can say that PDCA cycle of testing in more or less related to Emotional Intelligence and therefore we can say that Emotional Intelligence is related to testing.

Fig 3. PDCA cycle

Hope this article helps you to know the relation between EI and software testing If not then you can always contact us at ProtoTech Solutions to know more about their association.

HAPPY TESTING!!!!!!

Author: Ayushi A
Contact us:
info@prototechsolutions.com
ProtoTech Solutions

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