2 Assessing your organization’s readiness
This chapter covers
- Understanding the company you’re in and how that affects having a bug bash
- Recognizing and mapping your stakeholders
- Steering your company towards approval for a bug bash
As beautiful as the idea of a bug bash sounds, you may be skeptical: would it work in any organization? Every organization has peculiarities and constraints. How can we address different circumstances and still organize a bug bash?
When I join a company, I always like to get to know the company's landscape: how are decisions made there? Are there any organizational politics or cumbersome processes in place? What kind of bug bash makes the most sense? How can I get the leadership on board?
To steer your organization towards a “yes” for a bug bash, you will need to understand your organization’s testing culture, get to know the stakeholders, and persuade them. That’s not always easy, but they are highly advantageous and essential skills for anyone who wants to propose initiatives and drive change in organizations.
2.1 Understand your testing culture
When a company is small, it’s easy to understand how it works. The engineering culture is clearly pronounced. You know their habits and how each sees testing. The bigger the company, the greater the chance that it contains multiple “universes” within itself. Teams can differ significantly in their perspectives and ways of working.