Systems thinking, community linking: MoT Weekly – Issue 506

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What's been happening in the testing, QA and quality engineering MoTaverse? Let's go! 🚌

— Simon Tomes, Community Lead at Ministry of Testing

Community

Seven years of community: Ministry of Testing Athens Meetup by Petros Plakogiannis. Learn how to build a community and start a meetup from scratch. Bug congrats, Petros! See if there's a meetup near you, and if not, how about starting one? 🌱

"This was an amazing session. So fascinating to see all the thoughts and curiosity of an exploratory testing session live." — Eamon Droko. Last week Ben Dowen and Rahul Parwal led a software testing live session. It was brilliant! More coming soon. 🤩

QA Games Night at Berlin Meetup. 🎨

The Quality Talks podcast now has an official website with more to explore. Nice work, Stu Day and Chris Henderson.

Day in the life of a QA Engineer with Elsa.

🛰️ Testing Trends Weekly — Issue 6.

Give the gift of celebration! Send someone a "Bug Congrats" gift. ⭐️

Career Growth

Job moves

"I’m happy to share that I’m starting a new position as Staff Quality Engineer at Lokalise." Bug congrats, Gary Parker.
Shariff Elwardany has started a new position as Test Manager at Aspen Insurance Group.

Now hiring

Ironclad are hiring a Senior Automation Quality Engineer - AI and an Automation Quality Engineer.
Gary Shannon is looking for any Heads of Test Engineering within commuting distance to Basildon, Essex, UK.
Senior QA Engineer. Contact Jack Cole for info. Thanks to Ady Stokes for sharing this in the MoT Slack jobs channel.
Prommt is hiring. I'm adding 2 Senior Software Engineers (remote or hybrid) to our Product team. – Paul Healy.
Manual Tester and an Automation QA (Cypress) 2 days a week onsite in Calgary, Canada, perm roles. Contact Gabbi Trotter for more info.
Software Test Engineer, Abu Dhabi, Persian Gulf. United Arab Emirates.

Been away for a while, how do you catch up?

Lana Begunova amplifies the power of saying no.

Essentials

🎓 An update from MoT's resident Learning & Development Lead, Sarah Deery: “Module 8 is now available in the MoT Software Testing Essentials Certificate! This module focuses on what requirements are, exploring the many ways they can be documented—or sometimes not documented at all. You’ll learn how to clarify requirements so that the whole team has a shared understanding of what’s needed. By the end, you’ll be able to ask better questions, uncover hidden details, and check whether a requirement is clear enough to be tested.” Read the release notes.

I am curious on how you all frame the job role of a ‘tester’ these days.

Ady would like to know: How many testing specialisms are there?

What is a feedback loop?

Flaky Tests by Iziren John Chima.

How complex is Hello World really? by Akshat Virmani.

As a recruiter, will you recognise the Ministry of Testing Software Testing Essentials Certificate (STEC)?

Quality Engineering

📊 New analysis: 80% of people like us identify as Quality Engineers.

We gathered to explore what quality engineering means for our profession. Exploring Quality Engineering - The Testing Planet - Episode 8.

Keith Klain recommends the Engineering Quality Podcast with Alessandra Moreira, Royalee Martin and Veronika Pliusnina.

Systems Thinking

Expand your testing universe with Systems Thinking. Join The Testing Planet on the 27th of February, from 14:00 GMT.

What’s the biggest blocker that stops you from becoming a systems thinking specialist?

💡 Digital TestSphere helps testers brainstorm, coach, and share experiences. Unlock barriers that you didn’t know were there.

Explore and expand with Digital TestSphere

Strategy

The power of collaboration in cross-functional software delivery teams with Sam Farndale and Gina Chelton. A talk from MoT Manchester about good practices throughout the software development lifecycle at Auto Trader.

Yulia Shaifele describes how to set up a test policy.

Do you test in production?

Test-Driven Development Demystified with Jon Jagger.

What is ordered coordination? Markus Gärtner explains.

Why Static Analysis Is Key to Meeting ADAS Safety Standards by Ricardo Camacho.

Tooling

🛠️ Tool of the Week: Kusho.AI

Production is literally on fire 🔥 because your “tiny” change accidentally nuked the database. Rafaela Azevedo describes how Terraform tests saved a prod deployment.

There's a place in our world for tools that we throw away. James Lyndsay introduces Ephemeral Tooling.

Automation

Christopher McLellan is looking for best practices, tools, or libraries to help with: Automating a data download and comparison process, handling discrepancies and efficiently managing large JSON files.

Dobrin Visariev shares tips on implementing some of the new Selenium Bidirectional Protocol (BiDi) features into an existing Selenium-based test automation framework. How not to flip the table using Selenium BiDi.

Clive Galway would like your suggestions for a complex Application Under Test (AUT) on Java Swing.

Bugs

What’s the weirdest production bug you’ve discovered and/or helped debug?

When a Bug is Fixed Before it Hits Production. 😃

API testing

How I extracted JSON data from the backend and retrieved it in my Vue component. Creating an API with Laravel with Madeline Caples.

Mobile testing

Sydney Goodjoines shares a moment of transparency with her mobile testing struggles📱🐞.

Accessibility

What is your view of turning off CSS and JavaScript to view a website? asks Jane D'Cruze.

AI

AI vs testers? Friend or foe? Hosted by Robbie Falck with Gomathi Ramalingam, Gary Parker, Gek Teo and Andrew Fullen.

“Imagine a tool that learns from your app’s real-world traffic and turns it into ready-to-run tests.” Making regression testing a breeze with AI by Animesh Pathak.