Transparency in testing would, at least at first, seem to be an outstanding idea for everyone – client and development team(s), to maintain at all times. Why would anything need to be “hidden”, everything should be being done above board right?  

Well it is not really a matter of some binary choice between being transparent or opaque as much as it is a matter of making sure that the information being conveyed is understood correctly by the correct parties. For example, in an shared environment such as SharePoint where users from all sides of a given project can see comments entered by other members there may be instances of comments being read by those that should likely not see them – for example a question on best methods for retrieving data may serve to confuse the client when the question was really intended for another member of the development team. This can obviously be cleared up, but adding filters to these open forums may be beneficial. Not only would it serve to avoid unneeded confusion, it can speed up the flow of information when the conversations only involved the necessary parties. The larger discussions can be shared with all sides of the project during a project postmortem if desired.