We just finished going through the first (and major) round of reviews for Beautiful Testing. In most technical books this review is for technical accuracy and things of that nature. Because Beautiful Testing is 25 chapters on 25 different topics by 30 different people, the review was more for consistency of theme and relevance to the reader.

What was striking reading the reviews is just how good good feedback is and how bad bad feedback is.

Here is my working definition of what both these categories are:

  • Good – Provides opinion, why/how they arrived at the opinion, and in the case of negative feedback what would have changed their mind on it. Example: Rather than an overview of the history and current practice of testing at Company X, I would have gained more value from a chapter with a point, “We thought this, we tried that, we ended up deciding something else.”
  • Bad – Just an opinion. Example: Bleah. That was my only comment on this chapter.

The feedback from the person who I lifted the Good example was consistently good, and the Bad example consistently bad. Testers provide feedback all the time through their bug reports. And the ones that get addressed quicker are usually the ones from the Good bucket.

I suppose in testing terms, Good feedback includes the Observation, Oracle and Heuristics that were applied. Bad feedback has only the Observation.

So the question is, are you a provider of Good feedback or Bad feedback?