TL;DR

The language of business is often called “Suit Talk.” Developers and software testers talk in technical terms about their work, but your manager would like to hear how software testing relates to the benefits of company business. The post is based on a remarkable book written by Chad Fowler, The Passionate Programmer.

If you have ever seen Disrupt Event, you will notice that startup owners do not use technical terms. They must explain, or in Disrupt language Pitch, their startup benefits in the business language in several sentences. To become a passionate software tester, you must be able to explain your software testing work in business language.

Do not explain how did you do exploratory sessions. You need to explain why you did those sessions. What is the charter for this session? When you describe a software testing plan, do not just state that it is not possible to test everything in the application. Explain how and why you decided to test just this part of the application using only those software testing techniques. What risks do you mitigate using this plan? And risks and mitigation should be explained (pitched) in business language.

As an example, you are making sure that the search algorithm has o(n) complexity. o(n) notation is a heavy technical term. In business language, you could say that you test to check that the search feature could be automatically horizontally scaled by adding more servers.