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What's been happening in the testing, QA and quality engineering community? Let's go! 🚛
I hope you have a good week.
— Simon Tomes, Community Lead at Ministry of Testing
Community
Memories are the friends we made along the way. Add a photo memory today. 📷
"My MoT Profile is helping people find me & my work. It is boosting my connections, network, and organic engagements. Thanks, Team MoT for helping us testers productize ourselves via your platform 💜." – Rahul Parwal. Connect with more members, visit the profiles page.
🎄 What will you ask your boss for as a Christmas present?
"The 14th Ministry of Testing Athens meetup in the Hellenic American Union was awesome! 300 people. Simon Stewart talked about Webdriver BiDi Christine Pinto talked about Playwright and AI" – Petros Plakogiannis.
What do you say to someone who is falling out of love with software testing? ❤️🩹
Louise Gibbs is open to write, teach, speak and mentor. Check out all her amazing contributions to the community. ✨
Parveen Khan reflects on her November community work, which includes joining a recent The Testing Planet discussion on the limitations of shift-left.
Exciting! The first ever MoT London is happening on the 30th of January at the Lyst offices, sponsored by Original Software with speakers: Gomathi Ramalingam, Stu Day, Gary Parker and Andrew Fullen. Thanks to organisers Robbie Falck, Parveen Khan and Gary Shannon.
Getting to a Great Abstract by James Lyndsay.
"Loving this call for papers on DEI!" Submit to TestBash!
Career Growth
Job moves
- Jenna Charlton starts a new role as a Test Lead at AmpliFund.
- Chris Amos starts a new position as a Software Test Manager.
- Mathilde Popoff gets a promotion to a Senior Quality Assurance Engineer.
Now hiring
- Smartify are hiring for a QA Testing and Project Implementation Assurance Lead – Mobile & Web Apps. Remote/UK.
- QA Engineer, Contract, Notion, Remote.
- Happy Dance are hiring a QA Engineer, Full Time (fully remote).
Open to work
- You can now set your MoT Profile to open to work. Check out who is open to work.
Recent This Week in Testing host, Oleksandr Romanov shared a handy article about networking – via the MoT Slack.
Essentials
Software Testing Essentials Certification (STEC), a true alternative to ISTQB. Early bird pricing ends 22nd of December, the perfect Christmas bonus.
"THIS LOOKS SICK!!! Thank You, Ministry of Testing, very excited to dig into what this course offers."
Here's Sarah Deery, MoT's Learning and Development Lead, with an exciting update about what's coming soon with STEC.
- Elizabeth Zagroba and Beren Van Daele discussed risk analysis and share many learnings they didn't discover till they were years into their careers.
- Lena Pejgan Nyström's demo on question oracles and artefacts to uncover risks is great. She uses a test product and projects to share tips on what could be a risk and how to identify assumptions. She is wonderful at thinking about other people's contexts and what terminology might be used in different places.
- Manish Saini wrote a piece on the six techniques for risk analysis. Powerful lessons in this one.
- Ady Stokes is a powerhouse and has written several articles, reviewed many articles as an editor and designed activities which junior testers can apply immediately.
In case you missed this course: Learn how to dig deeper into the Web with the use of Devtools with Viv Richards.
What defines a junior software tester?
New 404 Talk with Stephen Platten: Stoicism and testing, ancient wisdom meets modern techniques.
📚 Nice first post added to the software testing glossary from Dan Alloun. T is for Together.
Continuous Quality
Are software testers responsible for continuous quality?
New! Take a deep dive into Continuous Quality, brought to you by The Testing Planet:
- Breaking Continuous Quality News from correspondents across the globe: Simon Tomes, Kat Obring, Philippa Jennings and Stuart Thomas
- An introduction to continuous quality by Stuart Day
- The limitations of shift-left and how to fix it, with Jitesh Gosai, Parveen Khan, Barry Ehigiator and Gwen Diagram
- A holistic view of continuous quality with the amazing Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory
Quality Engineering
Have you heard of the job title "Staff Quality Engineer"?
New podcast alert! Tune in for the launch of Engineering Quality with Alessandra, Royalee and Veronika.
A post from a while back got recent attention: What can testers do to become great Engineering Managers?
Ceep Klear.
Land on the quality engineering planet! Join Episode Eight: Exploring Quality Engineering. 🪐
Systems Thinking
A couple of excellent posts from Patrick Prill: Simplifying the view doesn’t make the system less complex and Testing is a lot about zooming in and zooming out – when zooming out leaves the product borders, it’s about more than just testing.
Expand your perspective with systems thinking! Register for Episode Nine: Exploring Systems Thinking. 🪐
🤝 The certification that gives junior testers confidence, community and connections.
Explore MoT Software Testing Essentials Certificate
Quality Coaching
What is quality coaching? What does a quality coach do? How does quality coaching fit into testing? The Community's Guide to Quality Coaching.
Step into the role of a quality coach! Sign up for Episode Ten: Exploring Quality Coaching. 🪐
Tooling
Tool of the Week: Allure Report 🛠️
Automate Modal Windows with Selenium WebDriver. A Java practice and code walkthrough with Lana Begunova.
The deceptive test: Screenshot a website and ask if it has deceptive patterns, created by Harry Brignull.
Automation
"Automated end-to-end tests work great to validate real-world behavior, but tend to fail at random times. How can we reduce their flakiness?" Dennis Martinez shares some ideas.
Roger Malgueira earned a MoT Foundation Certificate in Test Automation and Kenneth McDaid earned a MoT Intermediate Certificate in Test Automation. Double bug congrats! 🏆
Being human
Burnout: A personal experience report by Ady Stokes. Recognise the common signs of burnout, and explore practical strategies for seeking support and rebuilding well-being. Thank you for sharing your story, Ady. 💜
Oracles
What different types of requirements have you used?
Oleksandr Romanov in the MoT Slack: "Today, I learned: quick link to show all pull requests that you have been assigned as a reviewer (across all repositories) - https://github.com/pulls/review-requested"
Do you proactively read PRs? asks Kylee.
Risks
Alan Page describes the risks of risk management.
Strategy
What fun have you had, testing e-mail capture? asks Ben Dowen.
Myths, cognitive biases and mental sets in QA with Vitaly Sharovatov. 🧠
"The speed of change and measurable impact of your work becomes slower at more senior levels." Callum Akehurst-Ryan shares thoughts about pace of change.
Failing with grace: A tester's guide to error culture by Stefan Dirnstorfer. Improve user satisfaction and software resilience by prioritising thoughtful error messaging and a good error culture.
AI
AI Driven Test Automation with Playwright and Midscene with Gary Parker.
Performance testing
Quality Talks Podcast - E7 - Need for Speed with Stu Day, Tomi Tiihonen & Hardik Patel.
Accessibility
When Is a Skip Link Needed? by Akash Shukla.
Just for fun
Where's Bug and Cosmo? – No. 7.
Share a photo memory with the community
🗓️ Events
New events are always added, so keep checking the events page for up-to-date info.
- Auckland Meetup Tue 10 Dec 🇳🇿
- Berlin Meetup Thu 12 Dec 🇩🇪
- This Year in Testing Fri 13 Dec
- Manchester Meetup Thu 23 Jan 🇬🇧
- Episode Eight: Exploring Quality Engineering Wed 29 Jan 🪐
- London Meetup Thu 30 Jan 🇬🇧
- Episode Nine: Exploring Systems Thinking Thu 27 Feb 🪐
- Episode Ten: Exploring Quality Coaching Thu 27 Mar 🪐
- TestBash Brighton 2025 Wed 1–Thu 2 Oct 🤩
🗞️ Industry News
- Accessibility Testing in Action: Tools, Techniques, and Success by Hannah Son
- A guide to regression test suites by Rustam Sabirov
💡 Continuous Call for Contributions
We are now accepting abstracts for talks and workshops for TestBash Brighton 2025. Go for it! Submit an idea before the 22nd of December. ⚡️
Contributing to the testing community is a positive way to support your career. Unsure how? There are many ways for you to contribute and be rewarded. The bonus: Sharing your knowledge supports everyone's career growth!
Look out for specific requests in the "Help MoT" channel on the MoT Slack. ✨
Need inspiration? Look at the contributions page. 👀
Poll of the Week (with commentary)
