Raise your profile: MoT Weekly – Issue 494

How do community contributions support career growth? Join events and discover many ways to learn and contribute with the testing, QA and quality engineering community in this week's MoT Weekly.

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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

New! Everyone can now get an MoT Profile. 📜

"I am extremely honoured to have been included in the first award round of the new Ministry of Testing community certificate." – Ady Stokes.

Meet Oleksandr Romanov.

Ready to make your mark at TestBash Brighton 2025? Submit your talk or workshop ideas by the 22nd of December.

New! Professional Members can now add collections.

Discover why "shift left" isn't enough these days and how continuous quality can help. Join: Episode Seven: The community's guide to Continuous Quality. 🪐

Catch up on episode 60 of This Week in Testing with Ben Dowen, Christine Pinto, Olly Fairhall, Maneesh Maddala, Tom Game, Muhammad Rizwan, Vishnu Somanathakurup and Maithilee Kothuri. In this episode, folks shared tips for applying conference takeaways back at work and practical advice for using AI in testing responsibly.

MoT Vancouver's QA Walking Meetup and the MoT Leiria Meetup are just around the corner. 🇨🇦 🇵🇹

NEW: MoT Swag!

Auckland NZ MoT Community learns about AI in Testing and Testing AI. – Mei Reyes-Tsai.

Ministry of Mischief, who could it be?! 🤩

 

Career Growth 

Job Moves


Now hiring


Open to work

  • Francesco is based in London and looking for his next contract testing, QA or data role, reach out to him!

 

Christine Pinto shares how to create a personalised learning schedule with an AI assistant.

What’s a red flag for hiring a software tester? 🚩

How to get noticed in today's job market as a QA Engineer + practical tips for job hunt. Thanks for the positive MoT shoutout, Elsa!

Nicola Lindgren shares five interview tips to help you nail your next job interview.

Software testing careers: Many paths to success. Let Oleksandr Romanov help you explore multiple career paths in software testing to find the role that aligns with your passions and goals. 🧭 

 

Quality Engineering

"I like the word "pragmatic". It's what I remind myself to do more of. As a quality engineering leader sometimes the scope seems wide and there's lots of things that I'd like to do...however, are all of those items sensible and realistic?" – Melissa Fisher.

What's your take on Quality Engineering and where's it going?

 

Essentials

What advice could you share with Dan who is looking to move from a customer service role to testing? They've heard some environments can be toxic towards people who raise bugs. 😦

Module 3 of the MoT Software Testing Essentials Certificate (MoT-STEC) is up. 🚀

An update from Sarah Deery, Learning and Development Lead at MoT: "Contributions to MoT-STEC last week include articles from Manish Saini on risk analysis and Kat Obring on where testing fits in the SDLC. Test Chats video recordings with Kat Obring and Lisa Crispin on Testing Metrics. Test Bytes audio recordings with Christine Pinto, Rahul Parwal and Beth Marshall on test traceability." That's a lot of brilliant people contributing their knowledge and experience! This certificate gives junior testers not only confidence but also community and connections. 🤩

"What a treat to record a Ministry of Testing TestChat with Katja Obring and Sarah Deery! These 20 minute conversations are little golden nuggets to help newbie testers along their learning journeys." – Lisa Crispin

What different types of requirements have you used?

Tests in Production by Aj Wilson.

How do you know what to test? Tonnes of advice from the community on this thread.

Here's why we love origin stories. Perhaps you could add yours. 🌱

M is for Ministry of Testing. 😉 What else?

 

Accessibility

Ady Stokes helps another person with simple tests for accessibility.

 

Agile

Is Agile dead? 😵


 

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Tooling

Christine would like to know who is the real tool decision maker in your company?

Tool of the Week: TestRail 🛠️

 

Test Planning

Test Planning for software modernization from legacy by Ryan Craven.

"I am on a research mission to find out content that covers quality planning/testing requirements. I will edit and update this blog post as I find more." – Melissa Fisher.

 

Exploratory testing

Stories, guides, lessons and resources to help you with creating your test charters. The Community's Guide to Test Charters. 🥞

 

AI in Testing

Have you used GenAI Pair Testing as part of your testing toolkit? Comment on The Club.

Check out Tom Game's first post! The Impact of Dyslexic Thinking on Responsible AI and the Testing of Reinforcement Learning-Driven LLMs.

 

Contract Testing

Marie Cruz and Lewis Prescott's book is now available in physical print: Contract Testing in Action. 📙

 

Automation

Fixing flaky tests via Nicola Lindgren. 😅

Cale Maynard earned a MoT Foundation Certificate in Test Automation. Bug congrats! 🏆

Josh Grant reflects on the hazy divide between manual and automated testing.

 

User stories

The Backend User Story by Sebas Viquez.

 

Mobile Testing

5 Essential Tips to Get Your Mobile App Approved on the App Stores by Gabrielle Earnshaw.

 

Design thinking

Rethinking Design Thinking: My Shift in Perspective by Cheong Jeremy.

 

Testability

The true definition of testability with Ash Winter.

 

Just for fun

99 little bugs. 😮

The Tech Debt Constant Struggle, via Nicola Lindgren. 😅

Integration test "passed". Nice one, Peet Michielsen. 😆

 

A large crowd of people gathered in a grand event space. Lots of conversations are happening. A duck and bug character are hiding.

Share your memories with the community

 

🗓️ Events

New events are always added, so keep checking the events page for up-to-date info.

 

🗞️ Industry News

 

💡 Continuous Call for Contributions

We are now accepting abstracts for talks and workshops for TestBash Brighton 2025. Go for it! Submit an idea.

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. ✨

 

Poll of the Week

A survey question with four possible answers:  Have you used GenAI Pair Testing as part of your testing toolkit? "Yes", "No", "I plan to", "Something else, please comment"
Simon Tomes
he/him
Community Lead at Ministry of Testing
Hello, I'm Simon. I've had various roles in testing, tech leadership and coaching since 2003. I believe in the power of collaboration, creativity and community.
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