Comb-shaped testers: MoT Weekly – Issue 498

How multi-talented do we have to be? Read a roundup of news, events and ideas from the testing, QA and quality engineering community in this week's MoT Weekly.

🤝 The certification that gives junior testers confidence, community and connections.

Explore MoT Software Testing Essentials Certificate

What's been happening in the testing, QA and quality engineering community? Let's go! 🚐

I hope you have a good week. 

— Simon Tomes, Community Lead at Ministry of Testing

Community

MoT meetups are like free mini-TestBashes. Go get a taste of the very awesome testing community.

Yaroslav Yerokhin is organising another MoT Vancouver, happening on the 18th of December.  Christine Pinto will talk about enhancing test automation with Playwright and AI. And there's another MoT Newcastle on the 21st of January. Martin Underhill will share the types of barriers disabled people face every day. Thanks to Hannah Pretswell , Russell Craxford and Connor Irvine for organising.

Demi Van Malcot ran her mini-conference. Bug congrats! 🏆

Final reminder to contribute to TestBash Brighton before the 22nd of December. We're ready to be inspired. Are you ready to inspire?

Rob van Steenbergen and The Testing Planet in 2012! 📰

The QA Hype Show is coming in 2025! Led by Gary Shannon , the organiser of MoT Meetup London.

Maaike Brinkhof reviews her year and  Josh Grant reflects on his 2024.

Career Growth 

Now hiring

• Forrit are hiring a Test Engineer, Hybrid Remote, Scotland, UK.
• Oak National Academy are hiring a Freelance Quality Assurance Analyst. Thanks to James Sheasby Thomas for posting. I imagine he'd be a great person to work with! 
• Head of QA - UK, Hybrid.
• Various UK Government roles.
• Quality Assurance Analyst, freelance / UK. 

Open to work

• You can now set your MoT Profile to open to work. Check out who is open to work.
• Betina P. is open to work looking for a Lead or Senior QA role.
• Jovan Brown is open to work looking for a Quality Engineering Manager or Test Automation Leader role.
• Alana Lynch is open to work. "... all-around champion quality in your organization, gimme a shout."

The comb-shaped tester, does it make them a specialist or generalist?

Is a career switch to Quality Assurance Engineer worth it? asks K. Axel Harrysson.

New talk added to the website: Public Speaking and Procrastination with Benjamin Bischoff - available to watch on demand with a Professional Membership.

Essentials

STEC or ISTQB? MoT is here for you, for the complete journey.

Sarah Deery shares more exciting news about what's coming soon with the Software Testing Essentials Certificate (STEC). Dan Ashby and Janet Gregory recorded a chat about creating models to support your testing and how to get started with creating models. Amazing! Manish Saini has been creating lessons on gathering better information, understanding requirements, and analysing risk. So cool, right? Plus, STEC Module 5 - The struggles of software testing is live!

📚 W is for […]  

“This is a great source to practice testing, or any aspect related to it.” – Mahathee Dandibhotla .

Mohammad Faisal Khatri shares his top 10 GitHub repositories for software testers.

Continuous Quality

"I love this "whole team" approach! Once "quality" is defined, it absolutely is everyone's responsibility throughout the SDLC process. Kudos to a great discussion around this subject!" – KimBley (not Kim) Griffin, MBA . Source.

Quality Engineering

Engineering Quality Podcast is live! Bug congrats! 🥳

Embracing uncertainty in software development: explore why we react to change, how testing reduces complexity, and how curiosity helps teams build resilient, adaptable systems. Great post from Jitesh Gosai .

What do you learn from Site Reliability Engineers?

Systems Thinking

"Systems thinking is an approach to understand the system at hand, not to make it simpler. To make it simpler, or rather find out, if you can make it simpler again, you first need to understand the system. Find the simple rules, find the relevant parts, find the connections, and find the motivations. Then you can decide which parts, rules and connections to remove. Taking different perspectives is vital in this part."

Why am I writing so much about Systems Thinking? by Patrick Prill .

🎤 Call for Contributions open until the 22nd of December 2024

Speak or teach at TestBash Brighton 2025

Testability

Read Nicola Lindgren 's book review for "Team Guide to Software Testability" by Ash Winter and Rob Meaney.

My ugly is not your ugly, Elizabeth Zagroba encourages you to talk about it.

Being human

Making testing jobs safer for neurodiversity: Manual of Me by Maddy Kilsby-McMurray . Discover the benefits of creating a guide to telling people about you.

Exploratory testing

🕵️♀️ Test smart: how to explore a product like Sherlock? by Julia Kocbek .

Automation

Leveling up test automation with Christine Pinto.

W3C WebDriver Bidi, testing and you with Simon Stewart .

Lucy Swan earned a MoT Foundation Certificate in Test Automation. Bug congrats! 🏆

Learn how to combine testcontainers-k3s and Python to create isolated, reproducible, production-like environments for thorough testing. Kubernetes End-to-End Testing Using Testcontainers and Python with Manish Saini.

Mike Harris CITP FBCS shares ten reasons why you should lint your test automation code.

Intercept Requests & Responses with Selenium WebDriver BiDi Protocol with Lana Begunova .

CI/CD

Here’s another fantastic talk from the 6th Athens Meetup back in 2019! With Kohsuke Kawaguchi , the creator of Jenkins.

Coding

What are the differences between a compiler and an interpreter? Mukta Sharma explains.

Tooling

Tool of the Week: Postman 🛠️

Cypress or Playwright? Join the debate on the MoT Slack.

Congrats to LambadaTest for closing $38 million.

Understanding Jira Project Types and Agile Approaches by Sebastian Viquez .

Mobile testing

Google shared recommendations on testing Android apps. Here is an overview of it.

AI

Wayne Roseberry tell us the AI is only part of a larger system. AI testing bots have bugs and you need to test them. That sounds daunting and strange and “who tests the tests that tests the tests etc.” and turtles all the way down, but it isn’t really as strange as all that.

Predictions

What’s your prediction for software testing & quality engineering in 2025?

QA Trends to Watch in 2025: A Product-Centric Approach by Cotopaxi Lyon .

Just for fun

The Login Game: Login page that requires you to follow ridiculous rules.

Testers' Life - Expectation vs Reality. Nice one, Rahul Parwal . 😅

What photo memory could you share?

🗓️ Events

New events are always added, so keep checking the events page for up-to-date info.

• Vancouver Meetup Thu 19 Jan 🇨🇦
• Newcastle Meetup Tue 21 Jan 🇬🇧
• Manchester Meetup Thu 23 Jan 🇬🇧
• Episode Eight: Exploring Quality Engineering Wed 29 Jan 🪐
• London Meetup Thu 30 Jan 🇬🇧
• Episode Nine: Exploring Systems Thinking Thu 27 Feb 🪐
• Episode Ten: Exploring Quality Coaching Thu 27 Mar 🪐
• TestBash Brighton 2025 Wed 1–Thu 2 Oct 🤩

🗞️ Industry News

• Exit Criteria: Advanced Strategies for Agile QA Teams by Hannah Son
• Building a robust test automation base with a dual-tool approach by Sidney Karoffa
• What's Software Quality? by Mariana Santos

💡 Continuous Call for Contributions

Final call for talk and workshop abstracts for TestBash Brighton 2025. Go for it! Submit an idea before the 22nd of December. ⚡️

Contributing to the testing community is a positive way to support your career. Unsure how? There are many ways for you to contribute and be rewarded. The bonus: Sharing your knowledge supports everyone's career growth!

Look out for specific requests in the "Help MoT" channel on the MoT Slack. You could share your knowledge by recording an audio message for STEC! ✨

Poll of the Week (vote and add your commentary)