Strangely enough, but writing correspondence is an essential part of the testing work, moreover, it occupies much time.
Main tasks of correspondence:
- Elicitation of the requirements for new functionality and estimation of labor costs.
- UAT (Testing at customer side) – settlement of discrepancies and repair of missed bugs.
- Support for users and investigation of bugs on the product site.
E-mail is still the chief means of correspondence. Let us consider the basic rules, using correspondence as an example.
Any letter begins with a greeting, for example, Hello Tom. A greeting is an important part of the letter. Since most letters are sent to a group of people, but not to a single person, then by welcoming the addressee by name, you select him from the group and assign him responsibility for performing the task described in the letter. If the letter does not require an answer or any effort (for example, you want to inform your colleagues about the upcoming vacation), then you can contact all at once, for example, Hello Team.
Web testing services are used to improve quality of e-commerce sites by examining their contents and making these attractive to the visitors.
Most mail clients have several fields for addressees:
- To – To whom
- CС (Carbon Copy) – Copy
- BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) – Hidden Copy
As a rule, “To” includes those addressees, which you refer to in the text of the letter. “CC” indicates the rest of the team that should be aware of your correspondence, a hidden copy of “BCC” is most often sent to the management or to the archive, so you can restore the correspondence, for example, after termination of the employment of an employee and the removal of his account.
The greeting is followed by a brief description of the letter’s contents, for example:
Could you take a look at our questions about the new feature? – “Feature’s name”
Often, most letters are sent to the team leader, who distributes tasks across team members, answers to some are written by him single-handedly. In order not to read the letter as fully as possible with intent to understand what it is about, or who will be responsible for answering it, a brief description or introduction is required.
The whole bundle of letters can be divided into two large groups: elicitation of the requirements and description of the problem. When eliciting the requirements, you need to ask questions that arise when you read the task that the customer sent. The number of questions depends on how thoroughly the task has been worked out.
