Setting a good tone for the meeting

So far, this review sounds like it’s being conducted by polite robots, dispassionately discussing the best way to approach a feature. The team members will already have a lot invested in it, and conflicting characters might cause issues, so your specification review meeting should have a friendly and supportive tone. This is vital to drawing out discussions and resolving them successfully. If you are running this meeting, it is your job to set the meeting’s tone.

Why should a technical book about testing have a section on being nice to people? Aren’t SQL injections, database performance, boundary value analysis, and other things more important? While I will cover those areas, testing involves a lot of communication, both to understand features and to report issues. I promise it will only be this once, but, especially during the specification review, personal interactions can be the difference between a successful feature release...