Enhance Your Tester Relations Skills
Lead QA, AdobeDBDeep Barot
Founder, ContextQA (host)
Testing is a service to the project — and a tester's relationships with analysts, designers, developers, and project managers shape product quality. This session shows how to deliver bad news, raise better bugs, and collaborate without becoming the dreaded gatekeeper.
Walk away knowing how to apply it
What the conversation covers
"Testing is a service to the project" and how it shapes every interaction
The BA/product owner as the QA's closest early partner
Including senior QA in design to surface edge cases (not token attendance)
Reframing shift-left as involving experienced QA, not just any QA
Raising better defects with logs, DB/API checks, and reproduction steps
Two mindsets: toxic gatekeeper vs collaborative reporter
Working with PMs on late builds, prioritization, and avoiding burnout
The ideas worth remembering
Testing is a service to the project — that mindset reframes every relationship
Don't be the gatekeeper; report prioritized bugs and let the PM own the decision
Raise bugs with context and never frame them as blaming a person
Speak each role's language: numbers for PMs, features for designers, detail for devs
My job was to find what can go wrong. Then it's your decision — fix it, release it, or defer it. This is the team.— Raneesh Choudhary
Who you'll hear from
Raneesh Choudhary
Lead QA, Adobe
Deep Barot
Founder, ContextQA (host)
See ContextQA in action
Go from watching to doing — spin up an AI agent and watch it test, self-heal, and report for you.