Using Interest-Based Negotiation Tactics in Defect Resolution

When a product owner expresses the desire for the team to fix a defect in a particular way, development often holds its tongue and grumbles privately. The product owner does not understand the impact of the code changes from a developer's perspective. In addition, the developer assumes the product owner is always right.

Here is an opportunity for a tester to intervene and bring some skills from Interest-Based negotiation.

Interest-Based negotiation is a technique where you explore each parties' interests in more detail. The classic illustration is the following:

Two brothers are fighting over an orange.

The negotiator explores the first brother's desire for the orange in more detail and discovers the brother intends to use the orange to make orange juice.

Then, the negotiator scrutinizes the second brother's interests and discovers he is baking a cake and needs the peel.

Thus, the negotiator can find a win/win outcome between the brothers because he explored the deeper interests of the two.

Likewise, a tester can negotiate between the product owner and developer by exploring deeper. Using this technique, I've saved weeks of work by changing the solution to reduce coding complexity and satisfy the product owner's needs.