While a lot is written about developer-developer, developer-client, developer-team manager communications, I couldn't find any text which gives guidelines about tester-developer communication and relation.
Whether testers and developers are separate teams or in the same one (in my case, I am a lone tester in an agile development project), I have the belief that how testers are perceived is extremely important in order for testing to be well-accepted, and to serve its goal in enhancing the quality of the project (for example, they should not be viewed as a police force).
Any advices, or studies about how a tester should communicate with developers?
Update: Thank you all for your answers. They all confirmed what I had in mind. As for now, my team was very receptive of my role and we ended up making real progress. I could have chosen more than one as the answer but I had to make my decision.
Best Answer
The easiest way to improve communication is to work together with your developers (and designers and architects etc) and slowly breaking down those silly roles and eventually realize that we all are testers, except that some of us are have more experience than others.
For agile, just do it "by the book". Testers are part of the team and not just some external entity that you hand over stuff to when it's done. Your valued expertise is put to use during the whole development. First when creating user stories you help derive acceptance tests and make them automated. These tests are then used by the developers in their work. You also spend time daily to with exploratory testing of partial and completed work, and talk with the PO to clarify and improve your tests continuously.
That is what I mean when I talk about "work together". I am completely sure this is how communication in a team should work. This article explains it very well btw.
Opposite to this, many organizations like to handle development by putting all testers (and DBAs, and designers and programmers) in separate departments. This works against communication and only serves to cements the idea of phased development. Trying to improve communication in such a situation is possible, but the minor improvements you can expect is not worth the effort. At least not compared to actually putting people in the same room and creating cross-functional teams.