It seems like we are so preoccupied with the relationships between testers and developers that we seem to conveniently forget all other business functions and relationships.
I have had a bit of a dual role in the past few years. Part tester. Part marketeer. Part business owner. Part sales. Yep, it comes with the role of trying to get a young business off the ground.
The thing is, there is so much information out there that could be used by a tester, but most probably never quite makes it through.
So, lets take a quick look…at The Marketeer
When I have my marketing hat on I am doing many things, like:
- Monitoring - What people are saying about us? Do they love or hate us? What do they think of our latest thing? Where are they letting off steam about how great or poor we are doing? Are they doing this on their blog? Twitter? Facebook? LinkedIn?
- Email marketing campaigns – Are people listening? Do they care? Are they clicking on anything in specific? What are they completely ignoring?
- Web analytics – What are people doing on our website? Where are they clicking? Where are they not clicking? When are they leaving? Why are they leaving? When are they taking action?
- Sales – What kind of sales or enquiries are coming in? When are the busiest times? When is it quiet? What kind of questions are being asked?
- Contact – When are people getting in contact? Why are they getting in contact? Are problems being raised? Are we being praised?
- Research – What is being researched? Who is the target demographic? Does it match up to the software? What is marketing material is being used to promote the product?
This is by no means a comprehensive list, but it gives you a good idea. Sure, we are small and have a lot of visibility over these things and it’s not always easy to get hold of all this information. But can you? And if you could, how could it improve your testing?
Author Profile – Rosie Sherry
Rosie is the founder of Software Testing Club and loves to run the day to day activities of the community. You can follow her on Twitter @rosiesherry and very occasionally on her personal website – www.rosiesherry.com
Good points, Rosie. Here is another perspective. I test engineering software. We depend on our Product Marketing Manager to tell us how our customers really use our tools, and how they would like to. He has to get in there and find out how they really work. And then come back and help direct Dev in how the tools should evolve. And then work with QE on realistic usage flows so we can test the software in the ways it will really be used.
Coincidentally, I happen to be working on a blog post on the synergies between documentation and test.
Thanks for the comment Sean. Would you like to continue this with the 2nd in the series? “Documentation and The Tester”
#seriously
Okay, I’ll give it a shot. Give me a couple of days and I will email you something, see what you think.
Rosie, thanks for the important posting.
I think the tester must think about the consumers all the time, this is a part of our job. For example, I test Health Care medical applications and sick people who will use the applications all the time in front of me.
I do not familiar with marketing, but of course good marketing is very important for application success.
This should not be so easy to combine so many roles, I think.