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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
Community
We've added a couple more meetups to check out — a new online meetup with MoT Accra 🇬🇭 on the 29th of July and MoT Auckland 🇳🇿 on the 8th of August.
Celebrate community member contributions and learn from them. Visit the Collections Page and run a keyword search for "The community's guide to". What do you discover?
Thank you to our contributors who donate their fees to the MoT Scholarship fund. We see and hear you! The community are super grateful.
It was great to see Tobias Geyer celebrate his Pride 2024 "Testing" t-shirt. Nice one, Tobias.
Have you earned a badge? Visit My MoT to find out. 🏆
Career Growth
One of our recent monthly polls highlighted that 1,203 people are open to work. Tag the Ministry of Testing LinkedIn page that you're open to work and we'll repost it. Check out and reshare these profiles: Jamie Barnes, Nicholas Hammond, Nino Ristic, Mugisha Peter and Roy Baker. Thanks for tagging MoT! Our network is your network.
Bug congrats to Asma Muzammil for starting a new job as a QA Lead at Code94 Labs. 🎉
Squiz are hiring a Test Analyst (UI Javascript), based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Thanks for posting it on the MoT Job board, Deborah Sherwood.
Bugs in the news
Were you directly impacted by the Crowdstrike bug?
Things fall apart: 10 blue screens of death we thought we’d never see by Rabi'a Brown and Ady Stokes. Discover the history of system failures, from the Blue Screen of Death to rare Linux exploits.
Good to see how Ravisuriya Eswara analysed the Crowdstrike Falcon Update Incident. A great reminder of the power of questions.
"In today’s software world, with its unimaginable variety and rapid code changes, the truth is that all of us are experimenting in production." CrowdStrike Outage: What Can Cloud Native Teach Us? by Cornelia Davis.
I very much enjoyed Cassandra H. Leung's practical recommendations in their post: CrowdStrike: The Blame Game.
Measurement
QA myth busting: Quality can be measured by Vitaly Sharovatov & Rease Rios.
Essentials
"H is for humility. We need to show humility so that we can learn from each other." – Mike Harris.
During last week's This Week in Testing, we talked about the importance of going back to basics and the power of exploratory testing. Check out this collection: The Community's Guide to Exploratory Testing.
Test Cases
Test cases...don't write them. Is this really what the community thinks? Mirza Sisic shares the latest findings on test cases from the test community. Is this trend here to stay? 📉
I feel pressured to skip some test cases to meet the schedule. Is it ever acceptable to cut corners?
Blaise Wielk is wary of starting to use JIRA to manage their teams' test reporting and management. Can you help?
Accessibility
"There’s been a new wave of even more inaccessible captcha’s." – Dave House.
ARC Toolkit Now Available for Firefox.
James Baverstock evaluates Adobe’s new cloud-based auto-tagging feature for PDF accessibility.
New Advice on WCAG for Software and Documents Part 1 and Part 2 by Mitchell Evan.
Bias
"In this talk, I will address diversity by decoding bias, analyzing our current pitfalls in trying to retain a diverse culture, and provide some simple heuristics to help navigate the space that is Diversity and Inclusion." Combating Bias with Heuristics of Diversity by Ash Coleman.
AI
How do you think about anomaly tracking with LLMs? asks Balint.
New AI Models: GPT 4o mini and Llama 3.1 405B by Jakob Nielsen.
Roles and responsibilities
"Developers have more ownership of testing so what is the test engineer doing?" Nataliia Burmei shares how a Quality Assistance model helped her scale. I like how it's jam-packed with a "here's how we did it" with all the important reasons why.
Need advice on how to manage distributed QA teams? Watch this partner webinar from TestRail.
Edaware Ohghenekome would like to know, how do you establish an effective QA structure and process from the ground up?
"We started by having a conversation about quality." Oleksandr Romanov and Artem Grygorenko host the one where the test engineer explores holistic testing with Lisa Crispin.
Cookie Testing
Cookies are here to stay...for now by Aj Wilson. Tech giant backtracks on 4-year effort.
When was the last time your team tested cookies?
Regression testing
"Facts and evidence over feelings and opinions" – Melissa Fisher.
Good times! Join the testing community at TestBash.
Testing in production
"I'm loving these themed collections! They make me want to go and Learn All The Things!" – Veerle Verhagen. New Collection: The Community's Guide to Testing in Production.
Automation
Bug congrats to Teodora Perunicic and Daryna Olshanska for earning a MoT Foundation Certificate in Test Automation. 🏆
The discussion continues: ROI on UI E2E automation? Is it a myth?
The Community's Guide to Test Automation. It's a big collection. Good luck!
Communities of practice
Hot off the press! How I created and launched a successful community of practice - Empowering the team through a QA Academy by Cristina Carrageis.
I rediscovered this talk from Drew Pontikis. The MoTrix - Leading Communities of Practice. Plenty of advice if you're looking to start a community of practice in your workplace.
Just for fun
Brilliant song and great message. Thanks to James Wadley for flagging this in the Ministry of Testing slack, via Ady Stokes. 😃
🗓️ Events
New events are always added, so keep checking the events page for up-to-date info.
- Accra Meetup Mon 29 Jul
- This Week in Testing Fri 2 Aug
- Auckland Meetup Thu 8 Aug
- This Week in Testing Fri 9 Aug
- Pre-TestBash meetup by the beach Wed 11 Sep 🏖️
- TestBash Brighton 2024 Thu 12 Sep - Fri 13 Sep
- Leuven Meetup Thu 26 Sep
- Episode Five: The Apprentice Thu 24 Oct
🗞️ Industry News
- Advanced Strategies for Manual Software Testing – Hannah Son
- Taking care of your data with Exploratory Testing – Sérgio Freire
- Unpacking the CrowdStrike outage from a QA perspective – Vitaly Sharovatov.
✏️ Continuous Call for Contributions
"We believe people have so much to give and our role at MoT is to find the best place for them to fit."
How might you get involved? Read more from MoT's CEO, Rosie Sherry: A look inside our Continuous Call for Contributions process.
