Ministry of Testing Weekly Software Testing Newsletter

A Software Tester’s Guide To Influence

This newsletter is kindly supported by Practitest

Putting your testing approach into practice
How to implement your testing methodology while also maintaining the big picture of your overall coverage. Whether you are purely Agile, working DevOps, shifting to Automation, entirely or partially Waterfall here are the test management features to use (and how). Join the webinar.

Testing and the Community

• How can you use Machine Learning? — Bill Matthew’s 2-day course (happening next week) will introduce you to the foundational skills that will enable to take AI in Testing in new directions.
• Better Than Eurovision — TestBash is heading back to the Netherlands in 2020!
• Detroit Call For Papers — The deadline is fast approaching, so if you’ve got an idea brewing, make sure you submit before the 30th September!
• A Software Tester’s Guide To Influence — Discussing 4 key ideas that will allow you to develop the skill of holding Crucial Conversations successfully.
• Masterclass: Onboarding testers: Growing your new hire with AJ Larson — The recording is now available. Lots of good information for bringing on new testers as well as engaging with your existing testers again.
• What is the role of test manager? — Has it changed or evolved in the age of agile and DevOps?
• TestBash Germany 2019 — A Day Full of Great Conversations — Great write up from Elisabeth Hocke.
• Scrum and Psychological Safety — Have you come across the idea of psychological safety?
• Ministry of Testing Bobble Hat — Winter is coming, have you got your hat?
• How to avoid missing a bug — Some strategies to drive effective testing.
• My first experience at TestBash Germany — “I have to say that TestBash is different from other testing events”.

Upcoming MoT Events

• Testing Ask Me Anything — Mobile Testing — Daniel Knott — 8th October at 8pm UK Time
• TestBash Manchester — 2nd — Thursday 3rd October 2019
• Test.bash(); — 4th October 2019
• TestBash Australia — 24th — 25th October 2019
• TestBash New Zealand — 29th October 2019
• TestBash San Francisco — 6th — 7th November 2019
• TestBash Brighton — 26th — 27th March 2020
• TestBash Detroit — 23rd — 24th April 2020

Accessibility

• How To Get Development on Board With Accessibility Testing — It can often feel like an unwelcome and overwhelming disruption.
• Six Questions About Accessibility for Web Developers — Web accessibility can be a complex topic for new and experienced web developers.
• Accessibility and Motion — How to design the user experience you want for your sighted / non-motion sensitive users, without triggering distraction, nausea and migraines in the rest of us.
• Screen Reader Manuscript — Can you help Ady on The Club? Have you used the technique mentioned in the post or have any advice, templates etc.

Automation

• Cypress tips #2 — Testing email flows with Mailosaur — Get a glimpse of how to use Cypress with a tool called Mailosaur.
• Writing Good Gherkin Enables Good Test Automation — Could the use of Gherkin during the 3 amigos meeting help create good test automation?
• What I Learned at POST/CON Part I: Examples and Mocking — Kristin sharing everything she learnt there.
• Automation & Exploratory Testing — A symbiotic relationship — how can this mutually beneficial relationship help you become a better tester?
• Automate some of the things — Every so often, discussions in the online testing community turns to the “manual testing is dead” theme.
• E2E Test Experiments With Cypress — Simple tutorial to explore the benefits by comparing your current test suite to Cypress.

Business Posts

• VPN Servers for Developers & Test Engineers — Localization tests are a necessity for companies operating in different locations around the world.
• API Testing Mistake #4: Separating Load Testing from Functional Testing — Robert Schneider — Do you still run your functional and load tests separately?
• JavaScript Visual UI Testing with Selenium — JavaScript? It’s a standard. Selenium? It’s this great WebDriver. So, why do I get visual errors?
• Introduction to Payment Gateway Testing — Summarising the essential areas to be included in a payment gateway test plan.
• 4 Ways to Create a Quality Culture in Your Company — Quality culture in your company could mean the difference between a 5-star app that customers love, or a buggy app that falls flat on its face.
• Leading in Times of Organizational Uncertainty — Change is probably the only thing we can count on when working in tech areas.
• Using metrics to find the pain points in a legacy codebase — Figure out where to start and focus cleaning up your legacy codebase.
• The Top 4 Soft Skills Every Software Tester Should Have — Skills that will help you communicate well with the development team about that bug, among other things!

WonderProxy Switcher now supports browser location testing
The WonderProxy Switcher extension now supports browser location testing, in addition to geoIP testing. Start interactive localization testing within minutes. Available for Chrome and Firefox.

Tools

• Bug Magnet — Exploratory testing assistant for Chrome and Firefox.
• Wappalyzer — A cross-platform utility that uncovers the technologies used on websites.
• Selenide — A Java Based Automation Framework.
• Button Contrast Checker — Will analyse buttons on your page.
• UiTestCore — This package helps with writing UI tests by providing a wrapper around Selenium and other useful functions.
• Mockaroo — Mockaroo lets you generate up to 1,000 rows of realistic test data in CSV, JSON, SQL, and Excel formats.

Podcasts

Check out our forever automagically updated list of software testing podcasts…

• Collaborating Across Time Zones: A Conversation with Johanna Rothman — Chatting about mobbing and pairing with distributed teams, collaborating across time zones, and why soft skills are actually hard to learn.
• Episode 577 — Deepfake CEO Voice Scam — Now we have to worry about being tricked out by our voices.
• What do I need to consider when testing applications on Kubernetes? — Testing applications that are running on the Kubernetes platform and what additional aspects should be considered when running performance tests.
• Visual Programming for Automation with Duncan Brigginshaw — Discover a unique way to visually program automation for your web, mobile, and API tests.
• Episode 107: A Plethora of Principles — Taking a look at Testing Principles from Aaron Hodder and Luke Liu.
• Episode 584 — You Need To Make Sure Your LastPass Browser PlugIn Is Up To Date NOW — Make sure it’s updated.

Security

• Continuous Security — take care of your regression — Focusing on yet another avenue where testers can excel: regression testing.
• Beating the Security Challenges in IoT Solution Development — One of the most critical pieces of this IoT puzzle is that of security.
• New SIM Card Flaw Lets Hackers Hijack Any Phone Just By Sending SMS — Cybersecurity researchers revealed the existence of a critical vulnerability in SIM cards that could allow remote attackers to compromise targeted mobile phones.
• Microsoft, Hewlett Foundation preparing to launch nonprofit that calls out cyberattacks — It will also provide assistance to victims in an effort to highlight their costs.
• Facebook launches $10m deepfake detection project — It’s pledging more than $10m to the cause.

Jobs

• Software Tester — Manchester, UK
• Performance Test Engineer — Berlin, Germany

Meetups

• New Perspectives on Quality and Empowerment Through Observability — London
• Angie Jones, Your Tests Lack Vision: Adding Eyes to Your Automation — Boston
• Double Feature! The Future of Quality & Practicing the Theory of Constraints — Auckland
• MoTEC — Part 5 — Edinburgh
• Rapid Software Testing Workshop/Bug Hunt Battle — Manila
• PTM Meetup #4.1 — Porto
• September Meetup — Leeds
• Meet and Greet @ PromptWorks — Philadelphia
• Technical Testing — Software Testing Clinic Nottingham
• Panel: What makes a Good QA anyway? — Atlanta
• Test Lunch @ Kommune — Sheffield
• Testers of Cincinnati — come meet testers (like you) — Cincinnati
• End of Summer Social — Kansas City
• REST API Testing — Brisbane
• Continuous Testing with Gary Fleming, plus TestSphere — Glasgow