July 2018 RoundUp of All Things MoT

Get monthly software testing community news to your inbox - sign up for our much-loved newsletter!

July has been another great month, the 30 Days of Testing challenge went down incredibly well, we had so many of you getting involved! We also had lots of content and discussions happening.

The Club

A few selected discussions from The Club that we thought you might find interesting.

30 Days of Automation in Testing Day 4: What Types of Testing Can Automation Support You With? posted by heather_reid. From mundane tasks to data generation to cross-browser testing and more, there's a wealth of tasks that automation can support you with.
10 days of note taking experimentation - Start Mon 23rd posted by punkmik. Based off the blog post "10 Experiments to Improve Your Exploratory Testing Note Taking" by Alan Richardson, join the experiment!
Sprint 6 What's something that seems obvious within your profession, but the general public seems to misunderstand? posted by dominickua. Do the general public know we exist and do they think we're the reason for them receiving buggy software?
30 Days of Automation Testing Day 9 - Find, use and share your thoughts on an API testing tool posted by pmichielsen. Postman, Swagger, SOAP UI to name a few, there's a lot of tools out there and some useful thoughts here about them.
30 Days of Automation in Testing Day 25: Share what actions you take to make your automation maintainable posted by youngdq232. You might need a code refactor or it could be something as easy as descriptive variable names, there's many ways to ensure your automation code is maintainable.

The Club Ninja

Each month we select one of our Club users to be our Ninja of the Month. We have a super secret anonymous ninja for the month of July!

The Dojo

Snapshot of all the content produced for The Dojo throughout June. You'll find articles, podcasts and videos. We have a mix of free and pro membership content - as you might expect, as a pro member you have access to all content created.

A couple of new articles from the Testing Planet 2018:

A Practical Guide To Release Testing by Josh Grant. One of the most critical parts of any software project is releasing it out into the world, and customers.

RiskStorming In Agile Teams With TestSphere by Gem Hill. As a software tester, I am always on the lookout for new ways to get teams talking and sharing knowledge and information.

July’s 30 days of Testing Challenge: 30 Days of Automation in Testing.

A Community Thoughts article - A Software Tester’s Key Skill. There were a lot of great responses and a great deal of interesting words that I wouldn’t normally associate with testing, but yet, they were recommended.

Another MoT podcast from the Super Testing Bros - Neurodiversity Within Software Testing with Paul Seaman and Lee Hawkins

An unmissable Testing, Ask Me Anything with Alan Page on Modern Testing. Alan is a community builder and lover of learning. Alan is an author, as well as being part of the AB Testing Podcast.

A few new Testers’ Island Discs with Neil Studd:

Ep18 - Paul Maxwell-Walters. We get into philosophical and real-world political discussions, drawing parallels to our experiences in the world of software testing, sharing tales of teams who may have fallen foul of "sleepwalking" through their processes and discussing tips on how to help teams to negotiate these everyday pitfalls, and how to speak up within harsh working environments.

Ep19 - Maaike Brinkhof. We get into discussions about the connections between learning to play an instrument and striving for self-improvement as a tester. We discuss human biases, the joy of mob programming, helping teams to uncover unknown unknowns, and the benefits of utilising "analog time" to recover from the madness of the world.

All the talks from TestBash Dublin 2018!

99 Second Talks

Take The Blue Pill Or The Red Pill, You Decide If You Want To Change - Leigh Rathbone

The Anxious Tester - Chris Kelly

Testers As Test Consultants: How To Learn The Skills? - Lisa Crispin & Janet Gregory

Mistakes Matter: Maximizing the Benefits of Mistakes Made in Testing - Rosie Hamilton

How To Win With Automation And Influence People - Gwen Diagram

Beware The Pickle - Beren Van Daele & Ard Kramer

How To Make Your Test Environment Work For You - Erol Selitektay

From Tester to Test Coach: A Voyage into the Unknown - Rob Meaney

Organisational Psychotherapy Taster - Bob Marshall