Ministry of Testing’s Weekly Software Testing Newsletter

How to Learn Automation from Scratch

This newsletter is kindly supported by BrowserStack!

BrowserStack Webinar: Finding the balance — Trivago’s End-to-End test strategy

Join Benjamin Bischoff, Test Automation Engineer at Trivago on November 10th, and learn how they created and implemented an end-to-end test strategy that reduced build and feedback time & now empowers them to release multiple times a day. Register now.

All Things Ministry of Testing

The latest news, along with recent Dojo additions, events and interesting Club posts.

• Automation Week 99-Minute Workshops — For one week only, we’re opening up 99-Minute workshops to everyone, that’s right you won’t need Pro membership to attend, and there’s a cracking lineup. From automation stepping stones to deep dives, there’s a workshop to suit everyone.
• Performance Objectives to Improve Testers within the team — With the end of year approaching, many teams are starting to think about objectives for 2021, maybe you can find some inspiration here?
• Automation Week Challenges — A unique opportunity to boost your skills using problem-based learning. There are challenges around web & mobile automation, exploratory testing, accessibility testing, test data and pipelines. Dive in and see what solutions you discover.
• The Spiral Approach: A Path To Higher Quality — Empower yourself to challenge the cultural status quo and grow to trust your team more.
• Test.bash(‘Online’); — There’s a full day of Ask Me Anything sessions and members of the community taking to the stage to share their solutions to the challenges for the week. Join us to get inspired.
• How to Learn Automation from Scratch — Getting started from scratch, before even thinking about a language, can be a bit daunting.

Community News & Podcasts

Posts from our blog & podcast feeds — you can always check out the feeds if you want more.

• S2E1 — Fernanda Sesto — Advice from a young software tester on getting started — There can be differences between study and practice, Fernanda offers tips for success and what you might avoid in your first year of testing.
• What You Can Do Before Quitting Your Job as a Tester — Dennis explores how to navigate the feelings around wanting to quit your job and offers suggestions of what you can try before you make that decision.
• Episode 201: Robin Hood, Flippy, and the web ad bubble — Would you trust a burger-flipping robot? What about a group that claims to steal from the rich to give to the poor?
• Importance of Exploratory Testing — A question popped up on Slack this week asking what the purpose of exploratory testing is and how it can be a benefit, this post is an excellent starting point.
• The Social Lean Coffee — Lean Coffee is usually used to bring up points about a particular broad subject, but they don’t have to be work-related, do they? What if it could help your team get a bit of light relief?
• Nicolas Carlo: Changing Messy Software Without Breaking It — Nicolas offers advice for listeners who might feel like they are at a loss for how to get stakeholder buy-in on dealing with technical debt challenges.

99-Minute Workshops — October — November

Find out what time the workshops are happening in your time zone by clicking on a workshop.

• Test Automation for Product Managers — Join Karla Schönicke & Eli Flores at 4pm UK time — 26th October 2020
• Setting Up a Basic CI/CD Pipeline — Join Josh Grant at 8pm UK time — 26th October 2020
• Constructing a Test Framework — Join Titus Fortner at 10pm UK time — 26th October 2020
• Tests From The Crypt: Automating Away Functional Testing “Zombies” — Join Jason Branham at 2pm UK time — 27th October
• How to Become an Appium Desktop Ninja — Join Wim Selles at 12pm UK time — 30th October
• Tests From The Crypt: Automating Away Functional Testing “Zombies” — Join Jason Branham at 4pm UK time — 30th October
• Approval Testing — Join Emily Bache at 12pm UK time — 2nd November
• Visual Facilitation and Sketchnoting — Join Louise Gibbs at 6pm UK time — 4th November
• What Is Testing in Production and Why Would We Ever Do That?! — Join Abby Bangser at 11pm UK time — 5th November

Business

Posts selected from our business feed

• How Xray Helped Transform a Traditional European bank into an Agile Leader — With an agile mindset, and the right tools to support it, work faster, and deliver even more quality releases.
• 1 Simple Trick To Massively Improve Automation Efficiency — A single misconfigured line of code can cost teams in hours of lost feedback time and test error triaging — potentially costing companies hundreds of thousands of dollars.
• Testing for Fragmentation: The perfect cross-device test strategy for mobile — How do you know which browsers or devices to test on? And what does an ideal test strategy for that look like?

Upcoming MoT Events

• 99 Minute Workshops — We have multiple workshops running during different timezones in upcoming months.
• Automation Week — 26th — 30th October 2020
• Test.bash(‘Online’); — 29th October 2020
• Masterclass: A Guide to Usability — 8pm UK time — 10th November 2020
• TestBash New Zealand Online — 20th November 2020
• Masterclass: Explore the unknown with exploratory testing — 8pm UK time — 24th November 2020
• HolidayBash — 4th — 5th December 2020

Things You Might Have Missed

Articles and posts on Security, Accessibility and Automation from around the web.

• Nothing About Us Without Us…Including Pizza: The Practice of Designing with Accessibility in Mind — The impact of ignoring the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and not fully testing for accessibility and usability creates a barrier to use.
• Microsoft Teams Phishing Attack Targets Office 365 Users — The phishing email making it appear like an automated notification from Microsoft Teams.
• An opinionated guide to accessibility testing — A step by step exercise to see how accessible a website really is.
• Albion Online gamers told to change passwords following forum hack — Albion Online is contacting affected users via email but a malicious hacker might be contacting affected users at the same time using the stolen email address list.

Meetups

• Automation: Hype or Reality — KSA, Online
• Building Automation Engineers from Scratch with Jenny Bramble — Austin, Online
• UiPath Test Suite — 360 Degree Overview — Auckland