👋 Welcome to May's issue of MoT Monthly.
Once a month we share a round-up of how the MoTaverse has expanded. Ready? Let's go! 🚀
🆙 Product and Community updates
Our small team has been working hard to ship continuously. Here’s what we’ve been working on:
- We’re making great progress on the Software Testing Essentials Certification (STEC). Read an important update.
- It’s now easier than ever to earn a community star. Why bother? Community stars are a great way to showcase your commitment to your professional development. We're starting to automate more of the star reasons and can now deliver manual stars immediately via the MoT site. So you’ll get a star quicker — no more waiting for a month to see if you’ve got one. Check out your profile to see how many stars you have and explore all the reasons. Need inspiration? See who has earned a star this month.
- A tester’s role in continuous quality is now live. Enrol in the latest on-demand course. ♾️
- TestBash returns this October — our annual community-powered celebration of testing. Want in at the best value? Super early bird pricing ends 31st May. But this message isn’t just about price tags and dates.
- MoT Profiles just got an upgrade. MoT verification is a new layer of credibility in the MoTaverse— a user-friendly, easily recognisable purple check that demonstrates your commitment, presence and credibility as a software testing and quality engineering professional.
- Look who is leading with quality 👀
- There are three parts to consider when building a community. We aim to find the win-win-win for all three. Become a Friend of the Ministry of Testing. 🤗
- As quality and testing professionals, we’ve long felt like second-class citizens. Rosie Sherry, CEO and founder of Ministry of Testing, wants to be audacious and believes we can be at the centre of building amazing products.
🗓️ Join these events
Keep checking the events page for the most up-to-date info.
- Barcelona Meetup Thu 15 May 🇪🇸
- Cambridge Meetup Thu 15 May 🇬🇧
- Manchester Meetup Thu 15 May 🇬🇧
- This Week in Testing Fri 16 May 🎙️
- Souss Meetup Sat 17 May 🇹🇳
- Newcastle Meetup Tue 20 May 🇬🇧
- Manila Meetup Tue 20 May 🇵🇭
- Leeds Meetup Thu 29 May 🇬🇧
- Cincinnati Meetup Thu 29 May 🇺🇸
- Ghana Meetup Sat 31 May 🇺🇸
- Software Testing Live Wed 18 Jun 🔎
- Athens Meetup Thu 26 Jun 🇬🇷
- Cincinnati Meetup Thu 26 Jun 🇺🇸
- Software Testing Live Wed 16 Jul 🔎
- Leading with Quality Tue 30 Sep 🇬🇧
- TestBash Brighton 2025 Wed 1–Thu 2 Oct 🚀
All recorded events are added to the Ministry of Testing catalogue. Professional members have access to the entire catalogue of learning material. 🤩
⛳️ Courses
We've recently launched a new course for Professional Members. A tester's role in continuous quality. You will learn what continuous quality (CQ) is and how a culture of continuous quality can bring many benefits to both teams and the products they develop. From how individuals can contribute to strategies, to models and metrics that can help evolve a team's CQ through the development process.
Hear real-life stories and advice from experts. Many thanks to Stu Day, Lisa Crispin, Janet Gregory, Ady Stokes, Rahul Parwal, Barry Ehigiator and Nataliia Burmei for leading the way. Read the official announcement.
🥞 Collections
- Bugs in the wild
- SeleniumConf 2025
- Software Testing Live
- Software Testing Books
- The Testing Planet News
- MCP: Model Context Protocol
- Coming back to a career in testing
- The Community's Guide to Mocking
- The Community's Guide to Continuous Testing
- Agile testing for the modern quality engineering professional
- The quality leadership playbook: Insights from the community
- Exploring Systems Thinking - The Testing Planet - Episode 9
- Exploring Quality Coaching - The Testing Planet - Episode 10
- MoT London Meetup — Software Testing and Quality Engineer Meetup
- Systems Thinking Books for Testing and Quality Engineering Professionals
🎓 Certifications
STEC: The modern, essential, foundational testing education, co-created with 57 practising experts. When we set out to create the Software Testing Essentials Certification (STEC), we wanted it to be valuable, modern and co-created with the community.
It’s been a long journey. We’ve just shipped Module 13 of 18. Read why STEC matters and how you can help set up the next generation of testing and quality engineering professionals.
🖼️ Memes and memories
Photo memories and memes create history and stories.
Help expand the MoTaverse. Add one today.
🎓 Articles
- More than just ‘manual testing’: Recognising the skills of software testers by Ady Stokes
- How to contribute to open source projects as a software tester by Ima-Abasi Effiong
- Finding software testing opportunities early with the Requirements Review Model by Hanisha Arora
- Breaking the autopilot: How I stopped testing software like a machine by Ujjwal Kumar Singh
- Using an Agile definition of done to promote a quality culture by Emily O'Connor
- Simple Playwright authentication recipes: A cookbook for software testers by Swathika Visagn
Express yourself through writing. Share your thoughts, ideas and stories with a Ministry of Testing article. Share an idea for an article. 📝
📊 Testing Trends
- A theory of quality of four parts. How Google defines quality as part of developer velocity.
- Do software testing professionals understand what is meant by systems thinking? 66% of us seem to think so.
- Systems thinking needs more testing coverage. Sometimes we need to do a gap analysis on the conversations we hold.
- The Staff Quality Engineer role. 63% of you were not aware of the existence of the Staff Quality Engineer role.
- 23 language shifts every quality engineer can adopt today. The words we use every day matter, let's tweak them!
🎤 Talks
- Exploring Quality Coaching - The Testing Planet News - Episode 10 with Simon Tomes, Kulas Angeles, Emna Ayadi and Demi Van Malcot
- Pair Programming with AI: My Playwright Testing Journey with Christine Pinto
- Shop 'till you DROP; Software Testing Live: Episode 03 with Brittany Stewart and Ben Dowen
🇬🇷 The latest from MoT Athens
- Creating value through testing: a woman's journey in tech with Katerina Ragkousi
- Seizing opportunities: importance of soft skills with Stavroula Gkioni
- Leading the kubernation: a journey towards a migration story with Katerina Nikolaou
- From QA to Software Engineer in test: an accelerating journey with Dimitra Chatzigianni
- Discover the QA career path with Elpida Koutsoni
- Round table: women in test
View the talks database and all The Testing Planet sessions.
Do you have a talk idea? Submit one today. If something doesn’t fit our current events schedule, we can record it with you and publish it on the MoT site.
🔥 Hot topics
Join the conversation on The Club, our dedicated forum for all testing, QA and Quality Engineering professionals.
- What struggles have you faced when job hunting or hiring for a testing role?
- How do you add quality outside of the “testing phase” of the SDLC?
- What do you want to know from leaders in testing and quality?
- When has scope creep been good scope creep?
- How do you encourage curiosity in others?
- What should a tester’s portfolio look like?
- What job hunting tips can you share?
- Is test case management dead?
- Introductions Thread – Q2 2025
- … read and contribute to more hot topics
📚 Glossary updates
Glossary definitions that you can add to. Expand the MoTaverse, Professional members can add their own definitions. ✍️
- WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines)
- You Aren't Gonna Need It (YAGNI)
- MCP — Model Concept Protocol
- Defintion of Done
- Quality attributes
- Testing evidence
- Cognitive debt
- AI Deception
- Leadership
- Assertion
- TestBash
- … plus many more
🪐 Continuous Call for Contributions
Expand the MoTaverse! 50+ ways to earn a community star badge. Share your stories and support everyone's career growth. Submit an idea today.
And look who has already earned a community star this month. 🤩
🤝 Let's connect
We're committed to connecting testers, quality engineers and QAs no matter what challenges the world brings us. Here are the safe and inspiring spaces we provide and curate for the software testing, QA and quality engineering people: MoT Slack, Threads, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Instagram, The Club, TikTok and Mastodon.
🏆 Leading with Quality
As part of our culture, we want to make it very clear that when done well, with care and with intention, community is the best kind of education out there. The heart, mind and souls of so many people go into sharing everything they know, for the benefit of others.
Community as education is our thing. It can show up as events, as courses, as conversations, as research…and so much more. The key point is that community is always at the heart of everything we do.
We're building space for quality leaders, an intentional community investment to explore and expand the practice of leading with quality. 🚀
⭐️ Professional membership
A Ministry of Testing Professional Membership is available to advance software testing and quality engineering. Download a handy Professional Membership Overview PDF to share with your manager or someone you know who would benefit from signing up today.
♾️ Simplicity with Unlimited Membership
A lot is going on at Ministry of Testing, and our goal is to make it as easy as possible for you to access everything we do. We’ve seen how much of a stumbling block getting sign-off for budgets can be. To address this we’ve packaged everything up into one annual, much-reduced price and Unlimited membership. What do we mean by ‘everything’?
- Everything included in your professional membership plus
- Attend any TestBash and Leading with Quality event (if in a leadership role)
- Get certified with any of our 3 Test Automation Certification Courses
- Be the first to access and get certified with our Software Testing Essentials Certificate
- Any certification, event or TestBash we launch in the future.
That’s over £3,000 in value for just £1,499 (+ tax) a year. Go Unlimited. ♾️
👋 That’s all for now. Have a good month and we’ll see you around the MoTaverse.
Simon Tomes, Community Lead at Ministry of Testing
