MoT Cambridge

We’re back!
Join us for the first Cambridge Testing Chapter of 2026.

Note: The presentations will be held in the auditorium (down the corridor on the right-hand side when you enter the building).

Agenda

🍕 6:00 – 6:25 PM – Welcome drinks & pizza
🎤 6:25 – 7:00 PM – ==Infinite Loop * Infinite Space== – James Thomas
🎤 7:00 – 8:30 PM – Data quality is weird – Bob Salmon

Presentation 1 by James Thomas: ==Infinite Loop * Infinite Space==

How can we test software effectively when everything is subject to change, all the time?
Even if we assume stability for a moment, how can we cover the vast range of inputs, outputs, and product behaviours that any non-trivial application supports in a context where anything might have just changed?

In this talk I'll expand on that challenge and describe a tool I've built to help me address it for the product I'm working on at the moment. It combines aspects of model-based testing, property-based testing, and observability to take random paths through the application, making assertions about its behaviour and generating rich data sets for post-hoc analysis.

The tool extends my exploratory testing capabilities by letting me ask all kinds of questions, in particular about things that it would be impractical to try to investigate by hand because of the size of the state space of the system under test. It's not a substitute for standard regression testing, but it is a powerful complement to it, and I often explore the product myself while it is running, unattended, in the background on my behalf.

James Thomas

James is a software tester based in Cambridge but currently working for a German company, Ada Health, on a medical symptom checking application. He has been blogging about testing and software development at Hiccupps since 2011.

https://ada.com/
https://qahiccupps.blogspot.com/

Presentation 2 by Bob Salmon: Data quality is weird

The talk is about the quality of data and the pipelines that produce it. It starts with looking at software quality and then compares that to data quality. No prior experience with SQL etc is needed. If you have ever had your teeth set on edge by some dodgy data, come and find out how that have been prevented.

Bob Salmon

Bob Salmon is an accomplished Senior Software Developer, who “likes people, code and data. That means I think that things like quality and user experience are important too.”

Read more of Bob's thoughts on his blog: https://randomtechthoughts.blog/