Ministry of Testing’s Weekly Software Testing Newsletter

AI and Machine Learning Biases

This newsletter is kindly supported by PractiTest!

9 Steps to Evaluate Software Testing Tools and Find Your Best Fit Solution

It is easy to feel overwhelmed by the large variety of testing tools available. The following step-by-step guide will ensure your software testing tools evaluation process is swift and successful. Find the best solution for your QA needs.

Testing and the Community

• Testers’ Island Discs Ep36 — Jesper Ottosen — Podcast discussing the different aspects of testing ranging from leadership, biases and leadership to forming your own learning pathway.
• Testing Ask Me Anything — Quality Coaching — How could you position yourself as a quality coach in your team? Ask Sahar in our next AMA.
• Biases and cultural and social responsibility — Do you feel that AI and machine learning has the danger to stagnate cultural shifts and progress?
• QA/Test Manager: What skills are needed? — How do you see testing skills transferring to management roles?
• Management: Your Recruitment Pipeline Is Your Responsibility — How can you do more to improve diversity?
• Needed more than ever: courage — Courage isn’t exactly a skill, it’s more of an ability or characteristic, and we need it more than ever.
• Medical certification and QA — When a company starts expanding into the field of medical software, there are regulations to follow.

Upcoming MoT Events

• Testing Ask Me Anything — Quality Coaching — 8pm UK Time — 14th July 2020
• TestBash Manchester Online — 2nd October 2020
• TestBash Netherlands Online — 15th — 16h October 2020
• Test.bash(Online); — 29th October 2020
• TestBash New Zealand Online — 20th November 2020

Automation

• Managing Test Data — What can we do to better manage test data?
• Fast Forwarding Assert — How to bring the Assert forward to test your automation works.
• Automated API Testing with Cypress — Learn how to use it to perform automated API testing.
• Junit 4 vs 5 — basic differences — There are many differences between JUnit 4 and 5, some more obvious than others.

Business Posts

• Shutting down Observ.io — June 30th will be its last day, after which we will delete all customer data and concentrate our efforts on making WonderProxy the go-to solution for testing localized web applications.
• Six Ways Testers Can Help Programmers Clean Up Their Acts — Here are some specific ways testers can help programmers keep continuous testing goals in mind.

Accessibility

• Challenges with Accessibility Guidelines Conformance and Testing, and Approaches for Mitigating Them — This working draft explores challenges that occur in some settings when using the page-based conformance of WCAG 2 to verify conformance of websites and web applications.
• An intro to designing accessible data visualizations — Accessibility should always be a focus when designing products, and the same goes when working with data visualizations and graphs.
• Twitter Just Rolled Out a Feature That’s Inaccessible to Disabled Users — Twitter’s blunder is symptomatic of broader issues that pervade social media design and computer science education.

Podcast

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

• Episode 770 — Zoom Flips, Will Offer End to End Encryption For All But With A Catch — Zoom announced a few weeks ago they would not be offering end to end encryption for free users.
• Episode 47 Aaron Kraus: The Cybersecurity Educator — When information security is complex to teach, how do we build effective curriculums for diverse learning and application?
• 184: Vanity Bitcoin wallets, BlueLeaks, and a Coronavirus app conspiracy — A conspiracy spreads on social media about Coronavirus tracing apps, US police find decades’ worth of sensitive data leaked online, and is there a Bitcoin bonanza to be had from watching Elon Musk YouTube videos?
• Code Coverage and 100% Coverage — Code Coverage or Test Coverage is a way to measure what lines of code and branches in your code that are utilized during testing.

Security

• Oracle’s BlueKai tracks you across the web. That data spilled online — BlueKai has amassed one of the largest banks of web tracking data outside of the federal government.
• To evade detection, hackers are requiring targets to complete CAPTCHAs — Requiring human interaction thwarts automated analysis used by good guys.
• Norway pulls its coronavirus contacts-tracing app after privacy watchdog’s warning — The app poses a disproportionate threat to user privacy — including by continuously uploading people’s location.
• HEY pulls feature which could expose email threads without participants’ knowledge — A speedy response to a potentially sticky security problem.

Meetup

• Robot Framework for Fun and Profit — Online, Atlanta
• Ioana Porcarasu: Assuring or Not Assuring quality? — Online, Nottingham
• How to Remain Relevant as a Tester — Online, Berlin