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What's been happening in the testing, QA and quality engineering community? Let's go! 🚎
I hope you have a great week.
— Simon Tomes, Community Lead at Ministry of Testing
P.S. Heavy duck!
Community
Nataliia Burmei reminds us to "just show up".
Emily O'Connor kindly announces that the TestBash 2024 recordings are available and how to access them. Here's the TestBash Brighton 2024 Collection – an absolute treasure trove of talks related to AI and much more.
TestBash By the Sea! by Barry Ehigiator. Immerse yourself in Barry's heartfelt poem that beautifully captures the essence of TestBash 2024.
A room full of test exchanges.
Say hi on the latest Introductions Thread – Q4 2024. 👋
"In this episode of Quality Talks, host Stu Day welcomes guests Karen Todd, Rahul Parwal, and Ben Dowen to discuss their experiences at the Ministry of Testing - TestBash conference." Lovely to hear Stu give Philippa Jennings a positive shout-out! Plus many tips for getting the most out of and contributing to a testing conference, such as TestBash.
Join This Week in Testing on the 11th of October 2024. Listen in like a radio show or join the stage to share your week in testing. It's good to gather.
We're excited to be partnering this year with Cypress Conf 2024, a virtual event on October 22-23. Don't miss out on insightful sessions, interactive workshops and exclusive announcements. Register now.
Have you tried adding a meme or photo memory to the Ministry of Testing site? Which one to prioritise is the challenge. 😅
Career Growth
Trends: With your help, we’re polling, enquiring and supporting the testing job market. Look into the open-to-work data for August and previous months.
What are German companies looking for from Testing and Scrum Master candidates? Cassandra H. Leung shares their findings.
Jenna Charlton and the community share some of the tools they use to support their job search.
Now hiring
- Capital One is hiring for a couple of roles: Senior Software Quality Engineer - Mobile and Senior Software Quality Engineer - Services.
Essentials
"The six layers of testing is a mental model representing the fundamental levels of testing and how they interrelate. It highlights the benefits and tradeoffs and encourages collaborative discussions." – Jit Gosai.
What shapes are your tests? Cassandra H. Leung shares a few.
This talk introduces the work of the 'grandfather of quality' W. Edwards Deming and shows how his work helps us as testers. How does Deming's work on quality help us? with Mike Harris.
Critical Thinking
What is critical thinking? How does critical thinking support testing and help us build better software? What critical thinking approaches can I learn? This collection aims to answer many questions related to critical thinking: The Community's Guide to Critical Thinking.
"Antonella Scaravilli talk "How Applying Critical Thinking Saved My Mental Health", just went live on Ministry of Testing for all TestBash attendees and Professional Members. Anto, friend, you smashed it! Loved the talk, you delivered it sooo damn well. 👏" – Ben Dowen.
Manual Testing
A hot topic this year that's worth revisiting and adding your take on. Are we afraid to talk about non-automated test cases in 2024? Plus, vote on the latest poll.
TestOps
Four important reasons TestOps is trending with DevOps.
Leadership
Leading your development team as an individual contributor by Barry Ehigiator. Effectively lead and drive change as a tester by applying transformational and authentic leadership principles.
Outsourcing
How are your projects set up working with an outsourced testing company?
Performance reviews
Hanan would like to know: Working as a sole tester, or even with a team: How do you assess your job performance?
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Accessibility
Accessibility; who should be testing what and when? asks James Wadley.
How Accessibility Creates Loyal Users by Amy June Hineline.
Acceptance Criteria
Why does good acceptance criteria matter for engineers writing tests? Callum Akehurst-Ryan shares some thoughts.
Automation
Bug congrats! James Wadley, Lynda Hughes and Divya Rajendran earned a MoT Foundation Certificate in Test Automation. Check out Lynda's certificate. 🏆
Another quick handy tip from Judy Mosley: Cypress._.repeat.
Playwright Solutions Challenge: Debug and figure out why the video recording isn't in the HTML report? by Butch Mayhew.
Resolving Hydration Errors in React Apps with Rachel Lee.
AI in Testing
Are Software Testers using AI for Test Planning? The top seven concerns help us understand the answers.
How do I become competitive with Generate AI as a tester? by Mark Winteringham.
Holistic Testing
What’s your view on holistic testing? Lisa Crispin shares some reflections.
Test Reporting
Cassandra H. Leung offers up the Low Tech Testing Dashboard.
Test data
Delta Lake Data Generation by Peter Flook.
Tester and developer relations
"Been thinking about how different it feels being a dev vs QA." Meg shares a reflection.
Sophie Weston highlights: "I just want to say how thoroughly fed-up I am with hearing engineers, of all flavours, being referred to as 'technical resources'."
Security
This October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, here's a question to ponder, how often do you consider security vulnerabilities when designing and executing your test cases?
Hacking a satellite is not a new thing. Interesting points about ethical hacking.
"The vast majority of companies, organizations, and individuals lack the knowledge and abilities to keep up with the ever-increasing complexity of cyber threats." Cybersecurity Threat Intelligence: Leveraging Data To Stay Ahead Of Emerging Threats.
Incident Response
"By trying to properly understand the challenges, by clarifying the goal conflicts that arise in systems and result in sometimes frustrating trade-offs, and by making learning from these experiences an objective of its own, we can hopefully make things a bit better." – Fred Hebert. Source.
Microservice Testing
Arjun Iyer shares why staging is a bottleneck for Microservice Testing.
Were you part of TestBash Brighton? Share a memory
🗓️ Events
New events are always added, so keep checking the events page for up-to-date info.
- This Week in Testing Fri 11 Oct
- Xray Enterprise - Discover Test Case Designer Tue 15 Oct
- New York Meetup Thu 17 Oct
- CypressConf 2024 Tue 22 Oct
- Sheffield Meetup Wed 23 Oct
- Episode Six: The Apprentice Thu 24 Oct
- Building product-specific test strategies that go beyond “best practices” Wed 30 Oct
- Cincinnati Meetup Thu 31 Oct
- Cincinnati Meetup Thu 28 Nov
- TestBash Brighton 2025 Wed 1 Oct 2025 🤩
🗞️ Industry News
- How to Write Effective Test Cases (With Templates) by Hannah Son
- A complete guide to performance testing by Rustam Sabirov
- Nuances of Quality Engineering for Emerging Technologies by Ivan Filippov
✏️ Continuous Call for Contributions
Have you got something to share yet unsure how to get it out there? There are many ways for you and your colleagues to contribute and be rewarded. Contributing to the testing community is a positive way to support everyone’s career growth.
And hot off the press, we are now accepting abstracts for talks and workshops for TestBash Brighton 2025. Submit an idea.
Poll of the Week: How often do you consider security vulnerabilities when designing and executing your test cases?
