Ministry of Testing’s Weekly Software Testing Newsletter

How Would You Describe Automation to Someone?

This newsletter is kindly supported by Testcover!

Pairwise Test Design: It Only Looks Like Magic — Expected Results: Asking The Oracle

Your test design needs to exercise the system under test with several input classes. And you need to know required output classes are covered. Pairwise testing helps meet these needs.

All Things Ministry of Testing

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

• Embracing Leadership: My Journey to Stop Fearing and Start Leading — Pedro Gonzalez shares his journey in this TestBash Netherlands talk. To be able to lead a team, the things he had to go through to get to that point, the lessons he learned, and how reflecting on his own steps was key in helping him achieve this goal.
• Masterclass: A Guide to Usability — Join Melissa Fisher on Tuesday 10th November to delve deeper into the following usability areas on what you could look out for — Navigation, Feedback, Performance, Memorability, Learnability, Affordances and Error Messages. Bake it in from the start!
• Testing in Production with Talia Nassi — How do you know your feature is working perfectly in production?
• What Do You Do With Your In-work Down-time? — Do you use it to learn a new test-related skill? Or do you further your knowledge on a topic you’re already familiar with?
• How Would You Describe Automation to Someone? — Would you talk about its benefits? Pitfalls? Or would you take a different approach entirely?
• Gingerbread House Competition — It wouldn’t be a holiday party without a bit of light-hearted competition.

Community News & Podcasts

We’ve spent time picking out posts from our blog & podcast feeds that we think would be useful to you. You can always check out the feeds if you want more.

• A day in the life of a mobile app tester — Insight to how you can test during a code review.
• Using DevTools Search to Locate WebElements — Yet another way we can use DevTools.
• How to build your reputation as a software tester — Your reputation is something that follows you throughout your career.
• Do you lack time or focus? — Interesting thoughts from Alexander to help clear the fog.
• Test.Bash(“#Sketchnotes”); — Louise has done a Sketchnote of each of the AMAs from Test.bash(‘Online’);
• S2E2 Mike Lyles — Testing & leadership — Mike has recently published a book called The Drive-Thru Is Not Always Faster, where you can learn a lot about leadership, which is the focus of this podcast.
• Episode 860 — The Top Data Breaches And The Cost Of Non-Compliance — This episode goes over the top breaches and their fines.
• What Was I Thinking — Do you have strong ideas about what testing means? Do you think your definitions of testing have changed over time? You’re in the right place then.

99-Minute Workshops — November

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

• 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
• An Introduction to Web UI Automation — Join Mark Winteringham at 12pm UK Time — 9th November
• Interactive Accessibility Quiz — Join Ady Stoke at 6pm UK Time — 11th November
• Mocks and Testability — Join Ali Haydar at 11pm UK Time — 12th November
• API Testing in Python with Requests — Join Bas Dijkstra at 12pm UK Time — 16th November
• Git Foundations — Join Simon Berner at 6pm UK Time — 18th November
• Exploring Quality — Join Dan Ashby at 12pm UK Time — 23rd November
• Introduction to Creating Test Strategies — Join Huib Schoots at 6pm UK Time — 25th November
• Understanding Testability — Join Richard Bradshaw at 11pm UK Time — 26th November
• There’s No U in Coach — Join Gareth Waterhouse, Lindsay Strydom at 12pm UK Time — 30th November

Business

Posts selected from our business feed

• A day in the life of the Internet — Wonderproxy have roughly 250 servers around the world, they’ve shared an insight to their 2,852,372,148 rows of data gathered from all those servers pinging.
• Best Practices When Starting Performance Testing — Explaining the best practices when using Sauce Performance and how Sauce Performance works with the greater Sauce platform.
• Should Developers Write Any of The Automation? — I’ve heard this question asked so many times.

Upcoming MoT Events

• 99 Minute Workshops — We have multiple workshops running during different timezones in upcoming months.
• 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.

• Lessons Learned: Accessibility Testing — Srinivas taking us through some accessibility testing he did.
• Don’t Let Flaky Tests Ruin Your Automation — If you think that letting an unstable test case slide won’t cause any harm, think again.
• Google removes two Chrome ad blockers caught collecting user data — Nano Adblocker and Nano Defender have been removed from the official Chrome Web Store.
• Open Source Security Foundation launches a new certification program on edX — The Linux Foundation’s OpenSSF is introducing a suite of security classes and a certification for open-source programmers.

Meetups

• MoTMeetUpTour Spain — OTT Testing — Online, Spain
• Stuart Day: How to Achieve Speed With Quality — Online, Nottingham
• Debate Club — Online, Sheffield