You Are More Technical Than You Think!
Hello,
I’ve seen lots of you talking about your concern over automation taking over the world of testing and either not wanting to get involved in automation or just not knowing where to start. Maybe you’re more technical than you realise? I thought I’d share an interesting article from Claire Reckless — “What Does It Mean To Be A Technical Tester”. You are more skilled than you realise.
— Áine, MarketingBoss
This newsletter is kindly supported by Applitools
Intro to GitHub Actions for Test Automation — with Angie Jones
Curious about GitHub Actions? Join Angie Jones as she chats with Brian Douglas (Developer Advocate at GitHub), about how GitHub Actions — now with CI/CD — simplifies automating software workflows, so you can build, test & deploy directly from GitHub.
What’s New With Ministry of Testing?
We’ve some new webinar recordings, podcasts and a very exciting course announcement. Plus we want your help!
🎬 Our recent Masterclass with Larissa inspired the hundreds of people that attended. Addressing the way people thought about their user journeys and designing how people interact with your product can definitely impact how you test. You can now watch the recording and get some fresh ideas.
Julia Pottinger is a rising star in the testing community, she gave a talk to the Belfast meetup group on the Agile Tester Toolkit and how it will allow you to be knowledgeable in the right areas.
🎧 We have a new podcast series, you get to meet our 99-Minute Workshop instructors. We thought it would be a great way for you to discover which workshop is the right one for you.
Our DojoBoss Mark is looking for three articles around the topic of Critical Thinking. Have you got something you could submit? ✒️
We will launch a course with Marie Drake in February. You will gain knowledge about Cypress, the features that it can offer, the necessary steps on how you can write your first automated test and a plan on how to introduce Cypress to your work projects. Register your interest and find out when it goes live.
See our latest news and Dojo additions and catch up on anything you might have missed in the last few weeks.
Community
We’ve picked out a few posts from our Club, blog & podcast feeds that we think would be useful to you.
Many folks in the community are Balancing work and Schooling from home right now. How are you juggling this? 🤹♀️
The Struggle With Learning To Code is a relatable journey for Heather and many others out there. Time to focus on the process and not on the outcomes.
🐞 Ah, the joy of everything working locally…then you push to your deployment pipeline and it all goes horribly wrong. Marie shares how she dealt with these problems when she updated Cypress in her latest blog post “Debugging Pipeline Issues With Cypress”.
It’s always useful to have a few testing tools to help keep our testing ideas fresh. Nicola shares her Most Used Test Heuristics (with examples).
AB Testing are back with their first podcast of 2021. They talk (a little) about the US political situation, then discuss mindsets and skillsets — and then wrap things up with a discussion on estimation metrics.
💬 Abby Bangser talks to Anne-Marie Charrett in this podcast, covering a wide range of topics. They talk about Site Reliability Engineering, Service Level Objectives, Toil, the power of Storytelling, influencing Management and why Quality Coaching and Site Reliability Engineering have a lot in common.
Upcoming MoT Events
All of our upcoming events — including training, Masterclasses, Ask Me Anythings and Panel Discussions.
- TestBash Revisited Watch Party — Episode #11 — with Gwen Diagram and Ash Winter — 3.30pm UK Time — 25th January 2021
- Testing Ask Me Anything — Test Reporting — with Elizabeth Zagroba — 8pm UK Time — 26th January 2021
- Hands on WebdriverIO — with Julia Pottinger — 3 days raining — 1st — 3rd February 2021
- Panel Discussion — UI Automation — with Marie Drake, Julia Pottinger and Angie Jones — 8pm UK Time — 9th February 2021
- Software Testing Essentials Live! — with Mark Winteringham and Dan Ashby — 3 days training — 12th — 14th April 2021
If you’re interested in finding out about future meetups, whether online or in person, please check out the Club meetup section or keep an eye on the Slack Events channel.
Business
Posts selected from our business feed. Highlighting interesting posts from our annual partners for 2021 — they make sure we’re able to bring you excellent events, articles and everything else we do!
There is a plethora of test automation tools and frameworks available today. Is test automation becoming so technical and code-intensive that it’s in danger of alienating the subject-matter expert testers who best know the core of your business? An interesting post to read.
The Annual Testing in DevOps Survey is Open! Can you share some insight into how DevOps practitioners are rethinking long-term quality and testing strategies, where testing takes place in the DevOps pipeline, and what the overall QA impact is on the customer?
Learning a new skill can be incredibly daunting. Learning to break down what is needed to learn a new skill is always useful, this post “Habits + Deliberate Practice = Mastery”, has some great information to get you started.
99-Minute Workshops — January & February 2021
Find out what time the workshops are happening in your time zone by clicking on a workshop. Have a look at all our 99-Minute workshops.
- Team Care: Making Mental Health an Agile Practice — Join Jenna Charlton at 12pm UK Time — 18th January 2021
- Building — and Scaling — a Functional Test Automation Strategy — Join Bertold Kolics at 6pm UK Time — 20th January 2021 — This is open to everyone!
- Understanding Your Testability — Join Richard Bradshaw at 11pm UK Time — 28th January 2021
- What is Testing in Production and Why Would We Ever do That?! — Join Abby Bangser at 12pm UK Time — 1st of February
- Approval Testing — Join Emily Bache at 8pm UK Time — 3rd February
- API Testing in Python with Requests — Join Bas Dijkstra at 12pm UK Time — 8th February
- Understanding Your Testability — Join Richard Bradshaw at 8:00pm UK Time — 10th February
- Introduction to Creating Test Strategies — Join Huib Schoots at 12pm UK Time — 15th February
- There’s no U in Coach — Join Lindsay & Gareth at 8pm UK Time — 17th February
- An Introduction to Web UI Automation — Join Mark Winteringham at 8pm UK Time — 22nd February
- Mocks and Testability — Join Ali Haydar 8pm UK Time — 24th February
