Empathy

The last two posts had one thing in common (aside from the host) and that is they mention empathy as a key indicator of success. That might not really be noteworthy, but last week James Bach tweeted:

The whole point of testers is that they think like testers, and not like anyone else. But for collaboration, empathy matters.

Lets look at the wikipedia definition of empathy

1. the intellectual identification of the thoughts, feelings, or state of another person
2. capacity to understand another person’s point of view or the result of such understanding

The second definition is the one that really matters I think in testing. Especially when interacting with other team members which is a critical success factor in Agile (and pretty much every other methodology as well).

So I guess I need to be less like Dexter (minus the serial killing) and find some empathy somewhere.

Anyone have some I could borrow?