Ministry of Testing’s Weekly Software Testing Newsletter

Overcoming Moments of Wanting to Quit

This newsletter is kindly supported by PractiTest!

The Sessions of Fall OnlineTestConf You Won’t Want to Miss

The 9th OnlineTestConf (December 1–3, 2020) is on its way. 3 days of workshops and sessions led by some great speakers, who’ll be tackling the most debated topics on everyone’s minds. Attendance is free but the knowledge shared will be priceless. Check out the program & save your seat!

All Things Ministry of Testing

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

• Deactivating the “Somebody Else’s Problem” Field — Deployment pipelines that have failed steps which are taking too long to be fixed, tend to be covered by this field. In this article, you’ll find examples of such unpleasant steps along with some ideas and suggestions on how to improve them.
• Masterclass: Explore the Unknown with Exploratory Testing — Join Sérgio on 24th November at 8pm UK time. Learn how to optimize your testing strategy and how to stay focused testing, then automate tasks with Xray Exploratory App.
• Experience Report: Web API Automation — Beth Marshall & Viv Richards — Beth and Viv share the results of their advanced challenge. All of the Test.bash(‘Online’); recordings are now live!
• HolidayBash Activities — We’ve started to add in more activities to our HolidayBash! We’ve gaming sessions, challenges and a whole lot more on the way.
• Overcoming Moments of Wanting to Quit — Some solid advice if you’re feeling stuck in your role.
• Masterclass Further Discussion: A Guide to Usability — Melissa followed up her masterclass with resources to help you explore usability more.
• Hello, Cypress! with Kateryna Nesmyelova — People are already getting their questions in for the NZ speakers on The Club!

This newsletter is also kindly supported by Xray App

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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.

• Test grepping in Cypress using Module API — Filip helps you understand how to run a subset of your tests in Cypress.
• My Top Blunders With Test Automation — Everyone makes mistakes. But no matter how bad they seem, you can recover and, more importantly, learn from them.
• Jenkins: Check whether a DSL method exists — How do we check if a DSL method exists before calling it? Gregory has some answers.
• Machine Learning & Quality Assurance — Machine learning models are more complicated to test since we’re not explicitly programming the system’s logic. Nevertheless, Testing is still essential for high-quality software systems.
• Episode 871 — Microsoft Is Urging Companies To Stop Using SMS Based Multi-Factor Auth, Here’s Why — Multi-factor authentication is one of the easier and most powerful security improvements you can make on your accounts. However, there are options that are more secure than others.
• Front-end Performance User Experience Testing — In this episode, you’ll learn ways to start optimizing your application front end to give your users a quicker experience.

99-Minute Workshops — November

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

• 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
• There’s No U in Coach — Join Gareth Waterhouse, Lindsay Strydom at 12pm UK Time — 30th November

Business

Posts selected from our business feed

• How To Do Multi-Touch Gestures in Live Testing — This post gives you detailed, step-by-step instructions for how to perform multi-touch gestures during live testing sessions on the Sauce Labs platform.
• Test debriefings are great and simple when done right — There is one simple and straightforward practice that Joel has seen helping testers and teams all the time, but in most organisations, it is something that is not used at all.
• Mobile Testing Basics: Manual vs. Automated Testing — Building mobile applications is getting easier and easier thanks to toolkits and new programming languages. Testing those applications, on the other hand, is going the other way.

Upcoming MoT Events

• 99 Minute Workshops — We have multiple workshops running during different timezones in upcoming months.
• MoT Dojo Watch Party — Episode #3–3.30pm UK time — 16th 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
• Testing Ask Me Anything — Accessibility — 8pm UK Time — 8th December 2020

Things You Might Have Missed

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

• Microsoft advises users to stop using SMS- and voice-based MFA — There’s no doubt about the value of multi factor authentication but we need to be sure those factors offer a greater degree of safety against remote attacks.
• 10 Foolproof Tips for Maximizing Website Accessibility — Some excellent and easy wins here, this even includes examples of accessible and inaccessible code.
• Understanding Gender and Racial Bias in AI — What should you do if your company requires you to design technologies such as voice or facial recognition that have proven to perpetuate gender and racial biases?
• How to Document Coverage of Automation — Do you know how to document what your automated test does? Or how to communicate what it doesn’t cover?

Upcoming Meetups

• COVID Alert — From kick off to launch in 45 days — Online, Toronto
• o que usamos para testar? — Curitiba
• Modeling Systems in the Cloud — Online, Cincinnati
• “Have You Tried…?” with Gem Hill — Online, Barcelona
• Lean Coffee — Software Testing — Online, Los Angeles