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This is the third article in a series "Book Club" series. Today's post is taken from the book "Nine Lies About Work", a fascinating read. It's got to be in my top 3 books about working with people. The book focuses on 9 common lies or misconceptions at work that people tend to take as truth, myself included. Thankfully the book also describes steps on how to overcome them. I highly recommend it. Not only should all leaders and managers read this, everyone who works in HR should read it too. It's that good!

The chapter and the lie I'm focusing on is "The Best Plan Wins". My initial reaction is that this must be true, planning and being prepared is a must. Although I don't recommend writing detailed test plans and test cases, it's still worth planning ahead, surely? The book's main reason that "The Best Plan Wins" a lie is "The defining characteristic of our reality today is its ephemerality - the speed of change." The best plan isn't able to predict change in our workplace, and sometimes having a plan can make things worse as we become focused on sticking to the plan and not adapt when new information is made available. In Software Development and testing, I'd argue the speed of change is even greater.

How do we overcome this?

The key recommendation by the book is to communicate to your team, all the time. Communicate as much as you can, as frequently as you can, then trust your team to make good decisions based on the information they have.

If you're in a test management position, make sure everyone in your team is up to speed with all the intel needed. Your role is to ensure they have all the information to make good decisions, e.g. what to test, what not to test, how best to test it, what's the architecture like, who to contact when there's an issue. Share information about the business direction, about how customers use the software. Testing should be risk based, each business will have particular concerns or areas of risk, let your team know those risks and they can adjust their testing, sometimes on a daily basis, to identify the most important problems as quickly as possible.

Don't spend time writing a detailed Test Plan which will be out of date in no time and most people don't bother reading (TL;DR). Instead, focus on communicating. The best plan doesn't win. The best intelligence wins!