How do you create reliable automated tests?
5 min readDec 10, 2019
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Testing and the Community
- TestBash New Zealand Experience Report — Satinder Kaur received a scholarship to attend TestBash New Zealand. Read all about her experience and the difference it has made.
- TestBash Netherlands Super Early Bird Tickets are live — Brie there or you gouda miss out! 🧀
- Setting Sail into the Great Unknown: How I Got Started in Testing from a Non-technical Background — TestBash New Zealand talk from Mike Clarke. From being a Communications Warfare Specialist for the Royal New Zealand Navy to launching into a career in testing and becoming an active member of the software testing community in Auckland.
- TestSphere Sale — You can get 25% off your TestSphere cards until the end of January 2020!
- Power Hour — Coaching Experts & End Users to Participate in Testing — Ask Jesper Ottosen your questions on how to coach experts & end-users to participate in testing.
- Localisation Testing: Cultural Based Assumptions That Caused Issues? — I saw a tweet from @jennydoesthings this week that has caused me to pause for thought and also taught me a tonne about localisation testing!
- How do you create reliable automated tests? — What do stakeholders want? Reliable automated tests (aka checks). When do they want it? Now!
- Can tests cause bugs? — Have you considered this? Have you encountered any?
- The First Test On a New Feature — Never be bored.
- Changing the Perception — Working towards a Culture of Quality — In places where testing is perceived in a negative light, it is possible to move forward, but it will take hard work and use of the power of persuasion.
- Shifting towards Omni Testing — Part 2 — Sérigo explains why he likes to use this term to describe the multitude of testing activities teams do to succeed with continuous delivery and deployment.
- TestBash Manchester 2019 and The 8 Things I Learnt From Standing Up For Too Long — Insight into what testers feel guilty about.
Upcoming MoT Events
- Testing Ask Me Anything — Collaboration, Pairing and Mobbing — Elisabeth Hocke — 8pm UK Time — 1 hour — 10th December 2019
- Power Hour — Coaching Experts & End Users to Participate in Testing — 7pm UK Time — 1 hour — 8th January 2020
- TestBash Brighton — 26th — 27th March 2020
- TestBash Detroit — 23rd — 24th April 2020
- TestBash Netherlands — 28th -29th May 2020
Accessibility
- Why AI will never replace human picture descriptions — a bold statement, but this piece by Dr. Elizabeth Fernandez made my conviction even stronger.
- Four Years Later, Harvard Must Provide Closed Captions — What started out as a class-action lawsuit back in 2015, the NAD v. Harvard has become a well-known example in the accessibility community.
- 8 Weird Tips Accessibility Specialists Don’t Want You to Know! — Accessibility specialists don’t want you to know these tips because they’re bad practice. These are tips you shouldn’t follow.
Minimize Test Analysis Effort with Elasticsearch — Live session with live demo!
Join Experitest CTO Guy Arieli to discuss and demonstrate how Elasticsearch makes test analysis faster and more efficient. Learn how to upload test data, perform data manipulation and generate insightful views like hidden patterns, correlations, trends and baseline deviations.
Automation
- Risks, Issues, Benefits Of Tactically Automating Twitter — Every approach to automating has risks, issues and benefits.
- Testing on the Toilet: Tests Too DRY? Make Them DAMP! — Tests should be more readable and manageable.
Business Posts
- Best Practices for Identifying or Requesting User Locations — Take a look at why and how to identify or request user locations within your website or web application.
- How to Measure the Value of your Test Automation? — Many of us struggle to justify and measure the value of test automation.
- How Performance Testing Helped a Leading Insurer Improve API Response Time by 70% — A real world example where Performance Testing is implemented to optimize the application performance for better efficiency.
Podcasts
Check out our forever automagically updated list of software testing podcasts…
- Data Science Pipeline Testing with Great Expectations — Abe Gong — Data science and machine learning are affecting more of our lives every day.
- The Guilty Tester — Episode 13 — Testbash Manchester Unexpo 2019 Part 2 — Reflecting on some of the things that people wrote down about guilt.
- ABT 343 — Maciej Wyrodek — Talking about his experiences with modern testing, The Unicorn Project, and various rants about the state of software testing.
- Episode 634 — Another Unsecured Database In The Cloud Exposes Millions Of Records — This episode talks about this lack of security and how it puts users at risk but also the business itself from the data leak.
- Episode 34 Gerhard Eschelbeck: The Industry’s Beekeeper — Gerhard shared how his childhood fascination with computers culminated in leading a one thousand-person security engineering team at Google.
- 157: A biometric knuckle duster — What is Kaspersky’s ugly ring for? Is there something suspicious about how NordVPN lets you stream Disney+? And why did a hacker impersonate a music producer?
Security
- Spying tools website taken down after UK raids — A website selling hacking tools that let attackers take over victims’ computers has been closed down after an international investigation.
- Banning strong encryption does not mean catching criminals. It only makes you less safe. — Reuters reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had drafted a resolution for the international police organization, Interpol, that condemned strong encryption and called for encryption backdoors.
- Protecting users from government-backed hacking and disinformation — Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) works to counter targeted and government-backed hacking against Google and our users.
- SMS Replacement is Exposing Users to Text, Call Interception Thanks to Sloppy Telecos — Researchers from SRLabs found that telecos are implementing the RCS standard in vulnerable ways, which bring back techniques to attack phone networks.
Jobs
- QA Engineer — Halle (Saale), Saxony-Anhalt. Germany
- Agile QA Engineer — Austin, Texas. United States
Meetups
- #4: Testing in DevOps teams & Automation panel — Brno
- 2019 Retrospective and Christmas Celebration! — Manchester
- Paul Bruce, “Put That In Your Pipeline and Smoke Test It!” @ mabl — Boston
- Testing in Agile — Software Testing Clinic Nottingham
- MoT-PH & QE is the new QA collab Dec 2019 meet-up — Manila
- Our last Meetup for 2019 — Short Talks and Xmas Treats — Auckland