Weekly Newsletter: From Testing Hell to Testing Well
TESTING AND COMMUNITY
Featured Company: Wonderproxy
Take the uncertainty out of localization testing. WonderProxy network was built from the ground-up with localization testing in mind. Wonderproxy’s service spans 249 locations across 86 countries worldwide, which allows for focused testing.
Robots in Automation with Jason Huggins
Our next Testing Ask Me Anything on 15th January at 8pm UK time, is all about robots in automation. Why would a tester need a robot? What can robots do that Appium or Selenium can’t do? When is a robot the right tool for the job? These are all questions you can ask, register and get your question in, or upvote any question you want to be answered.
Masterclass — From Testing Hell to Testing Well — Adopting Whole Team Approach to Testability with Rob Meaney
How do high performing teams achieve the seemingly impossible task of delivering valuable software with increasing speed and frequency without compromising quality? Relentless focus on Testability. In our Masterclass on the 22nd January at 8pm UK time, Rob will share how you can make the changes to deliver changes safely, quickly and in a sustainable manner.
10 Most Popular Articles of 2018
In 2018, Melissa, our EditorBoss was focussed on releasing high-quality software testing articles on weekly basis to provide our readers with regular, relevant content throughout the year. We’re very proud of all the articles we’ve produced this year and are incredibly grateful to our authors for choosing to collaborate with us. These are our top ten most read articles of 2018.
TestBash CCFP Reviews Move Online — Come Contribute
Last year in order to ensure we have the best speakers at our events we moved to a CCFP(continuous call for papers), meaning that you could submit whenever inspiration hit. The growth of TestBash and our CCFP has meant that picking the conference lineup is tough and time-consuming! So, we’ve just put our CCFP Review page live! You can now contribute to Ministry of Testing and TestBash when it works for you.
TestBash Australia 2019
We’re coming back! We’re not coming back the same though. Not only will be serving up the awesome TestBash single track conference day, but we’ll be on the hunt for some bonza workshops to make TestBash Sydney a multi-day confer-fest!
Podcast — Super Testing World
Advice for new testers, and, what excites us about testing in 2019! Featuring Alix Klingenberg, Francis Ho, Bas Dijkstra, Lee Hawkins, Victoria Lee, Mike Clarke, Vera Gehlen-Baum and Rick Tracy.
How to test Bandersnatch by Rosie
Ok, I admit to not having ‘watched it’ yet. I blame the kids. Bandersnatch (incase you didn’t know!) is an interactive film available on Netflix. Or wait, how can you watch it all? How have you found watching Bandersnatch? I’m sure you had your testers hat on at some points.
Q and A with Joep Schuurkes by Women Testers
As a general answer I don’t think it matters that much which science(s) you’d learn, but rather how you relate them to testing. How much effort do you put into finding and exploring those relations?
Sweet Fifteen by James Thomas
What is the right number of tests? Which tester hasn’t been asked that question many times in one form or another? When will the testing be done? Can you test to make sure this works? How much effort would it be to test that? Can you show that performance has improved? We need to shorten the run time of the automated tests, can you remove some? How many test cases are passing?
Heuristics for debugging integration problems by Sunjeet
Outstanding Testers (that I have had the chance to work with/coach) did not just “report that there was a fire” , they were skilled at investigating and communicating.
Stop being clever — a UX case study by Bob Ricca
As UX designers we think we need to be overly clever to justify why our role exists. Sometimes I find the opposite approach to be more effective.
BUSINESS BLOG POST
A Scaredy-Cat’s Guide to Getting Started in Automation Testing with Python by Michael Ruttenberg
Scaredy-cat (noun, informal): a timid person, someone frightened by almost everything. Why am I a scaredy-cat? I am not from a developer background. Coding is scary and confusing. I don’t understand lots of codey-techie stuff and I am impatient to just get going. Classes? Page objects? Huh?! Crickets…So let me tell you how I got started in my automation journey…
Tester’s Diary: Reluctant Leadership, Part 1 by Carol Brands
I’ve never thought of myself as a leader. I don’t like telling people what to do. I don’t like feeling responsible for other people’s actions. I don’t like being put in a position where someone might treat my opinion like it matters more than someone else’s. The social dynamics that come along with leadership are uncomfortable to me.
Getting Started with Amazon Alexa Skills by Daniel Anthony Noventa
Ever since I saw the trailers for Alexa, I’ve wanted to know what sort of sorcery went on in the background to make it work. I imagined it would be such a difficult feat; filled with some serious natural language processing and machine learning jitsu. Thankfully, like most modern day technologies, it’s relatively intuitive, well documented, and has a relatively low learning curve!
Here ’s how you monitor your Google Actions: Verify your voice app is up and running 24/7 by Iván Pérez
2018 has been a great year for the world of voice interaction. Its constant evolution keeps us working hard to keep up and offer a variety of indispensable tools to ensure the availability and quality of your voice applications. As an example of this effort, let me show you three exciting new features that I am sure will enhance your abilities to deliver first-class voice apps. Let’s see them!
More Physical and Digital tools for Scrum Masters and their teams by Jesse Houwing
A couple of months ago I blogged about some of the tools and toys that live in the trunk of my car. I take these along everywhere I teach and coach. Since posting, people have suggested additional items that just must be in my toolbox.
PODCASTS
#11: Just the Accessible Tips by Parallel
I wanted to celebrate the end of another year by bringing listeners a few gifts from past Parallel guests. And as it turned out, there’s great stuff for users of iOS, Android, macOS and Windows. And games!
234: How Test Automation Will Change in 2019 by Joe Colantonio
Are you wondering what new automation and testing skills and tools you’ll need to know in 2019? Before my Automation Guild conference each year I ask potential attendees to fill out a survey to give me an idea of what things they’re struggling with.
How can I leverage production information captured by my APM tool in my load tests? by Ask PerfBytes
In this episode, Henrik Rexed (@Hrexed) and Brian Wilson (@emperorwilson) answer the question of how to leverage all of the great data the monitoring tools capture to create better load tests.
Episode 398 — My Security and Tech Predictions for 2019 by Security in Five
Happy New Year from the first episode of 2019! This epsiode goes over my personal security and technology predictions for 2019. I do this every year for a little fun and more so if they come true over the next 12 months.
Episode 95: The 2018 Reflection / Prediction Show by AB Testing
Happy Holidays to each and every one of our three listeners. We review and reflect on 2018, and talk about some things we think may happen in 2019. Listen all the way to the end for a cliffhanger from Brent.
UPCOMING MOT EVENTS
- Testing Ask Me Anything — Robots in Automation — 1hour — 15th January at 8pm UK time
- Masterclass — From Testing Hell to Testing Well — Adopting Whole Team Approach to Testability — 22nd January at 8pm UK time
- TestBash Essentials Brighton — 1 day — Wednesday 3rd April 2019 — Early Bird Tickets on Sale!
- TestBash Brighton — 1 day — Friday 5th April 2019 — Early Bird Tickets on Sale!
- TestBash Netherlands — 2 days — Thursday 23rd — Friday 24th May 2019 — Super Early Bird Tickets on Sale!
- London Tester Gathering Workshops — 3 days — Wednesday 26th — Friday 28th June — Sign up to the launch list
- TestBash Germany — 2 days — Thursday 12th — Friday 12th September — Submit your talk now!
- TestBash Australia — 2 days — Thursday 24th — Friday 25th October — Submit your talk!
AUTOMATION
RESTful API testing in C# with RestSharp by Bas Dijkstra
Since my last blog post that involved creating tests at the API level in C#, I’ve kept looking around for a library that would fit all my needs in that area. So far, I still haven’t found anything more suitable than RestSharp. Also, I’ve found out that RestSharp is more versatile than I initially thought it was, and that’s the reason I thought it would be a good idea to dedicate a blog post specifically to this tool.
Basic Capybara-Gauge: Set Up Headless Chrome by T.J. Maher
We’ve come up with test specs for Dave Haeffner’s The-Internet. We’ve set up a Ruby environment to run the tests, and configured Chrome to open the Login page. With this entry, we will be activating Chrome in Headless Mode, i.e. running Chrome but without a visual interface, allowing the tests to run faster.
Integration Testing with Spring — Profiles by Everyday Unit Testing
Today we’re going to discuss Spring profiles. Profiles are sort of a “meta configuration” in Spring. They are like a configuration for a configuration.
Automation will slice you up by Antti Niittyviita
William Murdoch began experimenting with using coal gas as a way to illuminate the city streets in 1790. It took years to perfect his invention, and in 1807 Pall Mall became the first street in London to be lit by gas.
SECURITY
30 Days of Security Testing — Day Fourteen by Mike the Tester
The challenge for Day Fourteen is — Develop a test plan including security tests. In my day-to-day work I don’t necessarily write formal test plans, but rather user stories for what I’m going to test.
Life as a Bug Bounty Hunter: A Struggle Every Day, Just to Get Paid by Erin Winick
Evan Ricafort works from home, his office taking up a room in a house that he shares with his family, which sits along a national highway in the Philippines.
Border agents are copying travelers’ data, leaving it on USB drives by Lisa Vaas
Are you one of the travelers to the US who’ve been stopped, questioned, and required to hand over your electronic devices for search? Our apologies: there’s a good chance that we still have your data kicking around on a USB drive. Somewhere. Maybe. Unless we lost it, I guess.
TOOLS
Fifteen Free Tools to Help With Testing by Kristin Jackvony
There are a great many articles, blog posts, and presentations that discuss automation frameworks and strategies. But even the most robust automation framework won’t eliminate the need to do exploratory testing.
ACCESSIBILITY
Dinolytics Release and WAVE Roadmap from webaim
We’re happy to announce the release of Dinolytics — an enterprise-level web accessibility evaluation system based on WAVE.
A UX Guide For Designing Error Pages by Alana Brajdic
There’s more to a 404 page than you’d think. A cute illustration might raise a smile but we need to make sure we’re actually helping the user with the pain points they’re experiencing in that moment.
JOBS
Test Engineer — London, UK
Here at ClearScore we want to help everyone manage their finances better. We launched in July 2015 and now we have over 8 million users worldwide, and have recently launched in India. We like to try new things and at our core, is a passion for our user’s experience. Because of that we have won awards for innovation, the design of our product and our use of technology. It’s a great start, but we have bold ambitions and that’s why we want you to join us.
Test Engineer, London, UK
We’re looking for a Test Engineer to join us and actively contribute to the overall success of the company. This is the perfect opportunity to step up to the plate, take ownership of this key role and showcase your capabilities. Your primary objective will be to test an exceptional, secure, mobile app and Golang microservices.
MEETUPS
Meetups happening soon!
- La figura del QAcilitador (de tester a facilitador QA) — Madrid
- Talking about Testing — Software Testing Clinic London
- Ministry of Testing, Bengaluru — First Meetup! — Bangalore
- Ask us anything — Software Testing Clinic Manchester
