February RoundUp of All Things MoT
With so much going on we don’t want you to miss a thing!
4 min readMar 1, 2018
Well, it’s been a wonderful February. Plans are coming along nicely for our upcoming events and the content this month has been top notch, as always! We’ve gathered up everything that has gone live, as well as those upcoming events, in this one monthly email!
The Club
A few selected discussions from The Club that we thought you might find interesting.
- How do you choose a programming language for software testing automation? posted by heather_reid. Do you hope that the developers will be able to help you or do you pick something that you know?
- How would you test voice recognition? posted by heather_reid. As the use of Siri, Cortana and Alexa increases, it’s time to think about how we might test them.
- What topics would you expect to see in a book for new testers? posted by rosie. If you wanted to hand a book over to a new tester, to help them get to grips with the world of testing, what topics would you expect or like to see in it?
- Favourite Retrospective formats posted by gemma.hill1987. What do you or don’t you like about your current retrospective format?
- Resources on Spotify? posted by testhexe. What testing podcasts do you know of that are on Spotify?
- Tech language confusion — Different words that describe the same thing posted by kimberley. There are so many acronyms and different terms out there, it can be easy to be talking about the same thing but using different terms that the other person might not recognise.
The Club Ninja
Each month we select one of our Club users to be our Ninja of the Month. We’re delighted to announce that Chris Simms is our Club Ninja for February!
The Dojo
Snapshot of all the content produced for The Dojo throughout February! You’ll find articles, podcasts and videos. We have a mix of free and pro membership content — as you might expect, as a pro member you have access to all content created.
A few Testers’ Island Discs to listen to with Neil Studd:
- Episode 9 — Richard Bradshaw: Richard joins Neil for a chat about the joys of mobile testing, as well as giving some insight into his new role as “BossBoss” and sharing information on some of the Ministry’s new initiatives for 2018.
- Episode 10 — Shey Crompton: It’s all back to Neil’s, as he’s joined by a fellow tester and local neighbourhood resident Shey Crompton, to discuss Shey’s experiences with the worlds of contracting and consulting.
- Our cool new comic by the Artful Tester Episode 1: The Journey to Co-creation. When we don’t see our experiences or hopes represented within the stories we tell one another, we may feel that they are insignificant and become discouraged. We can support one another as we try, fail, struggle, learn, and grow. Together. I think I’ve found it here, with Ministry of Testing.
- How To Write A Software Test Plan, answered by the Software Testing Clinic. Many organisations do test planning, but many don’t realise all the value in test planning. Testers often produce test plans for no better reason than they always have or the process says they should. Done properly, a test plan can be a very useful weapon in your testing arsenal.
- TestChat Summary: Discussing AI Testing. Testers joined the fourth Ministry of Testing #TestChat to discuss all things AI Testing.
- An Ask Me Anything with Trish Khoo on Test Management. Trish has been a student of testing for many years, with lots of experience gained while working at the likes of Microsoft and Google. Watch this fantastically insightful session on Test Management
- A Masterclass with Hilary Weaver-Robb: Not All Who Wander Are Lost: A Career Experience Report. Sometimes, your career path leads you in unexpected directions, and there’s nothing to be ashamed of! Hilary shares her journey that took her from QA Lead to QA Engineer, to Quality Architect, and back to Engineer. This journey took time, and a lot of introspection — be prepared to do some of your own!
- A new podcast from the Super Testing Bros ‘Improving Office Culture’ with Marianne Duijst and Rick Tracy.
- A new article series ‘Community Thoughts’, find out what the testing community thinks of Software Testing Certifications. Software Testing certifications have been around for various software testing jobs and roles for a while. One of the more popular topics of discussion on The Club, our software testing community forum, has been around certifications.
Two great new articles from The Testing Planet 2018:
- Testing In Production The Mad Science Way: Circuit Breakers & Science Experiments by James Espie. Deploying big changes to production can be scary. Even when you’ve done as much testing as you think you possibly can, you still may not feel comfortable with making changes in production.
- Crowdsourcing Your Learning: Using Social Media To Create A Personal Learning Network by Melissa Eaden. Learning more about software testing can be a challenge. While testing a product, at some point the realization comes that there might be more things to learn, and a wider audience to learn from than co-workers or management.
March Events
- Testing Ask Me Anything — Quality Engineering — 13th March 2018–8pm UK Time
- TestBash Brighton — 15th — 16th March 2018
- Masterclass: Introduction to VR Testing — 20th March 2018 — 8pm UK Time
Future Events
Just a quick sneak peek at what events are coming up in the next few months
- TestBash Netherlands — 12th — 13th April 2018
- TestBash Dublin — 18th May 2018
- TestBash Germany — 14th September 2018
- TestBash Manchester — 27th September 2018
- Test.bash(); — 28th September 2018
- TestBash Australia — 19th October 2018
- TestBash San Francisco — 8th — 9th November 2018
