Weekly Newsletter: Culture Is Often Framed By What You DON’T Say
Sharing lots of topics for you to digest
TESTING AND THE COMMUNITY
Why you should add Exploratory Testing for Optimum QA Coverage
You could be catching those crucial issues and preventing defect leakage! Find out how you can improve your testing practices and software quality, by adding Exploratory Testing to the mix of Scripted and Automated tests with this free guide.
Culture Is Often Framed By What You DON’T Say, Not Necessarily By What You Do Say — Ash Coleman
The videos from TestBash Germany are now live! We’ve made Ash Coleman’s talk free to all members, along with the 99 second talks. Why not build your own online TestBash and watch the various talks available!
Testing Ask Me Anything — CI/CD and Delivery Pipelines — Abby Bangser
We have a new Ask Me Anything live webinar on Tuesday 13th November at 8pm UK time. This time we’re talking about CI/CD and Delivery Pipelines. We’ve all heard of CD before, but do we know what the difference between Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment? Once you’ve registered this is just one of the questions you could ask Abby.
Call for Testing: Gutenberg 4.0 Pre-release by designsimply
Gutenberg is currently the main focus for the testing group and it is the new editing experience in WordPress. The goal of Gutenberg is to simplify the creation of rich pages and posts in WordPress by replacing old custom HTML, CSS and shortcodes with native Blocks.
Welcoming a team member shouldn’t be this hard by One Man
As an esteemed team member, you will need to be involved in welcoming a new team member to an existing team. You have to make them feel welcome and productive. Consider these following ideas to make the first few weeks great.
The Sacrifices of the Servant Leader by Adam Knight
Being in a position of leadership is a mixed blessing. Many of us starting out in our careers assume that achieving a position of leadership, and the respect that comes with it, is something to ultimately aspire to.
Heuristics for Hiring Specialist Testers by Jeff Nyman
I’ve talked quite a bit about the interview process for testers. Here I’ll try to distill some of that material around my experiences with hiring test specialists. By this term, I mean exactly what it sounds like: people who have chosen to specialize in the discipline of testing.
Demystifying Testing by Kent C. Dodds
How to get from aimlessly testing or not testing at all to really understanding how and what to test.
What have you learned the hard way? by Rosie
Career, tech, testing, or life related…Do you have any stories to share about things you learned the hard way?
Get on our radar by submitting your blog to our Testing Feeds or emailing something interesting to community@ministryoftesting.com
BUSINESS BLOG POSTS
VSTS CI/CD with Environment Variables by Curtis Zorn
When using VSTS Build/Release pipelines, we can run Powershell and other scripts as part of execution. Typically we have defined Environment Variables for these pipelines that allow us to share common information between Tasks (e.g. — Environment Name, Resource Group, etc.). But what happens if we have some generated value we want to share between Tasks?
Writing DRY XCUITest Tests With Base Classes by Shashikant Jagtap
Apple’s XCUITest framework gives us an ability to record the basic user journeys to get started with XCUITest, but the recorded tests are not scalable and reusable. We have to take efforts to make the XCUITest more readable, scalable, maintainable and reusable.
5 Challenges Associated with Performance Testing an SAP Application by Bob Reselman
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications are the lifeblood of large organizations. They tie all the activities of the enterprise together — from payroll to purchasing and sales — into a central digital platform allowing all members of the company to work together intelligently and cohesively.
Test Automation in 2019: Glimpse of the Near Future From the Experts Who Shape It by Addie Ben-Yehuda
Test Automation thought leaders gathered for a round-table discussion about the upcoming trends, best practices, tools, and ideas that will shape your Dev/Test environment in 2019.
PODCASTS
48: A GUI for pytest by Test & Code
The story of how I came to find a good user interface for running and debugging automated tests is interleaved with a multi-year effort of mine to have a test workflow that’s works smoothly with product development and actually speeds things up.
072 Monitoring Minecraft — Why and What to Learn from it with Mike Villiger by PurePerformance
Minecraft — the hugely popular sandbox video game — might not be your traditional software to monitor with an APM (Application Performance Management) tool.
Episode 342 — Why You Should Rethink Using Facebook To Sign On To Websites by Security In Five
Facebook had a large breach. The extent of that breach is unknown but the initial reports are as many as 50 million to maybe 100 million accounts were breached.
Episode 91: Stories and Models and Things by AB Testing
We answer a mailbag question, begin to dive into what attributes make up a quality culture, and talk about other stuff.
Episode 343 — Ways To Secure Your Wi-Fi For Home And Business by Security In Five
Chances are you have a wireless router in your home and/or small business. Out of the box routers are not secure properly, default settings left alone are easy entry points for hackers.
TECH
Dark Patterns And Other Design No-Nos For Mobile by Suzanne Scacca
The mobile web is a booming place right now, which means web designers are spending lots of time trying to figure out how to win over this particular class of users. One way not to do that? Dark patterns.
We Use Too Many Damn Modals
Modals are the crutch of the inarticulate designer and developer.
Designing contemporary search experiences — less typing, more context by Mat Devey
Over the last few years there’s been an important paradigm shift in ‘search’ and understanding the end user has been crucial to evolving the search experience.
Push Notifications Are Broken by John Brownlee
For users, they’re informational at best, and pestering at worst. So why isn’t enough being done to prevent notification fatigue?
Docker’s detached mode for beginners by ryanwhocodes
Detached mode, shown by the option --detach or -d, means that a Docker container runs in the background of your terminal. It does not receive input or display output.
Amazon scrapped 'sexist AI' tool
An algorithm that was being tested as a recruitment tool by online giant Amazon was sexist and had to be scrapped, according to a Reuters report.
Uber has agreed to pay more than $140 Million for a data breach settlement by Harikrishna Mekala
The Ride Sharing Company Uber has agreed to pay $148 million dollars to settle the massive data breach in 2016 which exposed personal data of more than 57 million of its users.
UPCOMING MOT EVENTS
- TestBash Australia — 1 day — Friday 18th October 2018- Tickets On Sale!
- Masterclass A Software Tester’s Guide to Expertise | Vera Gehlen-Baum — 23rd October 2018 — Save your space!
- TestBash San Francisco — 2 days — Thursday 8th — Friday 9th November 2018 — Tickets On Sale!
- Testing Ask Me Anything — CI/CD and Delivery Pipelines — Abby Bangser — 13th November 2018 — Save you space!
- TestBash Essentials Brighton — 1 day — Wednesday 3rd April 2019 — Subscribe to launch list
- TestBash Brighton — 1 day — Friday 5th April 2019 — Subscribe to launch list
- TestBash Netherlands — 2 days — Thursday 23rd — Friday 24th May 2019 — Submit your talk or Subscribe to the launch list
TOOLS
sitespeed.io version 7.5
Today (the 10th of October) is six years ago we released sitespeed.io 1.0. A lot have changed (for the better) over the years and today we are doing release number 200!
Contrast Grid
Test many foreground and background color combos for compliance with WCAG 2.0 minimum contrast. Include one color per line, with an optional comma-separated label.
Application Security Platform End-to-end
Security should be a seamless part of Devops. Kiuwan enables a DevSecOps approach by silently adding security without the need to analyze on central servers thanks to its distributed engine and the speed of its analysis.
SECURITY
Penetration Testing is a Bad Word by Emma Lilliestam
As a female penetration tester, I have had a fair deal of jokes thrown at me. People outside the IT industry get shocked and confused. People inside the industry try to quench their nervous laughs.
The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies by Jordan Robertson and Michael Riley
The attack by Chinese spies reached almost 30 U.S. companies, including Amazon and Apple, by compromising America’s technology supply chain, according to extensive interviews with government and corporate sources.
Google did not disclose security bug because it feared regulation, says report by Jillian D’Onfro
Google did not initially disclose a Google+ security bug when it first discovered it this spring because it feared regulatory scrutiny and reputational damage, according to a Wall Street Journal report citing documents and people briefed on the incident.
The Pentagon’s Weapons Are ‘Easily Hacked’ With ‘Basic Tools’ by Matthew Gault
America’s newest weapon systems — the F-35 jet, missile systems, and other cutting edge machines — aren’t ready to withstand cyber attacks and can be “easily hacked” using “basic tools.”
ACCESSIBILITY
Accessibility Scanner App on Android by Rakesh Paladugula
Accessibility scanner is an accessibility testing tool available for Android devices. No technical knowledge required to use it. It is an easy to use and self-explanatory mobile accessibility testing tool.
Google Slides Offers Real-Time Automated Captions by Deborah Edwards-Onoro
Imagine you’re attending a presentation where the speaker’s words are automatically captioned in real-time on presentation slides. Think that’s a feature you’ll see in the future?
Designing UI with Color Blind Users in Mind by Rich Staats
Color plays an integral role in UI design. When done right, it improves user experience, influences purchasing decisions, and reflects the brands voice. So, how do you design effective, accessible, and aesthetically pleasing interfaces for color blind users?
Web Accessibility: What You Say vs. What I Hear by Mikey Ilagan
My background is in web design and development. These days, I’m an Accessibility Specialist advocating on behalf of the user. I use assistive technology to audit, review, and examine software the way a person with a disability might use it. I then work with product teams to identify and resolve these issues.
To Make Your Product Accessible, Consider Accessibility at Each Stage of the Design Process by Jessica Ivins
Shortly before I joined the company, the team released its newly redesigned “drag and drop editor” to customers. The team was proud of what they launched. They put countless hours into designing and developing the editor. They were excited to ship a big, new feature. But there was a problem.
AUTOMATION
How To Run Your Tests with Headless Chrome by Chris Kenst
If you want to run your tests headlessly on a Continuous Integration (CI) server you’ll quickly realize that you can’t with an out-of-the-box setup since there is no display output for the browser to launch in.
All your automated tests should fail by Gregory Testing
A crucial little caveat to my statement that automated tests aren’t automated if they don’t run automatically: All your automated tests should fail… at least once, anyway.
JOBS
Software Systems Tester (Cramlington, Northumberland. UK)
Our complex software systems are crucial to our business and we need a capable tester who can be the first to develop and execute an approach to testing our system.
Test Manager (Leeds, West Yorkshire. UK)
You will report into the Head of Technology for the Bet Customer Tribe and with your Test Leads you will shape the testing done on your squad’s applications and services.
QA Automation Lead (Amsterdam, Netherlands)
This is a fantastic opportunity for an experienced QA Automation expert to build the long-term automation strategy from scratch, in line with the business requirements and produce best practices that can be replicated across different business verticals.
MEETUPS
Meetups happening soon!
- MoT Newcastle October Meetup — Newcastle, UK
- Web Application Security — A Hands On Testing Challenge, with Dan Billing — Edinburgh, Scotland
- How Codeless Selenium and ML solve existing QA challenges — Boston, USA
- Technical Testing — Software Testing Clinic 1.8 — Brighton & Hove, UK
- SWTC Midlands — Become a Mentor — Nottingham, UK
- Ministry of Testing #03 — Rio De Janerio
- The challenges of test data management in test automation — Exeter, UK
- Web Application Security — A — Glasgow, Scotland
Hands On Testing Challenge, with Dan Billing - Testers’ Bouldering Social — London, UK
- Lean coffee then dinner with test discussions — Gothenburg, Sweden
