👋 Happy new year and welcome to January’s issue of MoT Monthly. Once a month we share a round-up of our testing events, new content we’ve shipped and ways to help each other.
We recommend exploring the following links. Let’s go! 🚀
🗓️ Join these events
New events are always added, so keep checking the events page for up-to-date info.
- This Week in Testing Fri 10 Jan 🎙️
- Newcastle Meetup Tue 21 Jan 🇬🇧
- Manchester Meetup Thu 23 Jan 🇬🇧
- Bengaluru Meetup Sat 25 Jan 🇮🇳
- Episode Eight: Exploring Quality Engineering Wed 29 Jan 🪐
- Auckland Meetup Thu 30 Jan 🇳🇿
- London Meetup Thu 30 Jan 🇬🇧
- Sheffield Meetup Thu 6 Feb 🇬🇧
- Episode Nine: Exploring Systems Thinking Thu 27 Feb 🪐
- Episode Ten: Exploring Quality Coaching Thu 27 Mar 🪐
- TestBash Brighton 2025 Wed 1–Thu 2 Oct 🤩
All recorded events are added to the Ministry of Testing catalogue. Professional members have access to the entire catalogue of learning material. 🤩
🥞 Collections
- A short, sharp and handy set of “404” Talks. Quick talks to learn from when there’s little time available.
- The Community's Guide to Test Management. Managing testing, test management and organising testing.
- The Community's Guide to Mobile Testing. Mobile testing, mobile automation, mobile testing frameworks.
- Software Testing and QA Skills. An exploration of the skills required by software testing and quality professionals.
- Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment
- Continuous Quality - The Testing Planet - Episode 07. In this episode, you'll have the chance to listen to brilliant minds explore the topic of Continuous Quality and the limitations of shift-left.
- The Community's Guide to Quality Coaching. What is quality coaching? What does a quality coach do? How does quality coaching fit into testing?
📊 Testing trends
- Are software testers responsible for continuous quality? The lines between testing and quality are blurring.
- The comb-shaped tester, does it make them a specialist or generalist? The testing community is multi-talented.
- Do you understand what is meant by Continuous Quality? The quality engineering and testing space continues to shift everywhere.
- New test team: 70% put test strategy as the most critical. What is the most critical first step in setting up a testing function?
🎓 Certifications
Software Testing Essentials Certification (STEC) is a true alternative to ISTQB. It’s time to approach learning about testing differently.
The Software Testing Essentials Certification from Ministry of Testing is a modern introduction to the world of testing software. It’s created with a forward-thinking lens and with current experts from within the software testing industry. Our goal is to equip the next generation of software testers to confidently move forward in their careers.
🖼️ Memes and memories
Photo memories and memes create history and stories for the testing community. Add a meme or photo memory today.
- Spaghetti code?
- Reporting same bugs to developers
- Software Testing Essentials Certificate (STEC) is here!
- Ceep Klear
- Testers' Life - Expectation vs Reality
- Where the Special Elves Go
- Rob van Steenbergen and The Testing Planet in 2012!
- MoT Athens donated laptops to children
- MoT Athens Lean Coffee in Allwyn Lottery Solution
- Keeping warm…
- Where's Bug and Cosmo? – No. 10
- Very first MoT indoor meetup in Vancouver! Where’s Wally?
- Very first MoT indoor meetup in Vancouver!
- Coding Challenges Workshop - TestBash 2024
- TestBash TestMatch
🎓 Articles
- Burnout: A personal experience report by Ady Stokes. Recognise the common signs of burnout, and explore practical strategies for seeking support and rebuilding well-being.
- 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.
- All about application cookies: Software tester edition by Mirza Sisic. Discover how cookies affect privacy and UX to be able to test and secure applications effectively.
- An introduction to Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) pipelines for software testers by Ady Stokes. Discover how testers can add value and improve quality by understanding and contributing to CI/CD pipelines.
Express yourself through writing. Share your thoughts, ideas and stories with the community via an MoT article. Share an idea for an article. 📝
🎤 Talks
- An introduction to continuous quality with Stuart Day
- Continuous Quality - The Testing Planet News - Episode 07 with Simon Tomes, Philppa Jennings, Stuart Thomas and Kat Obring
- Cosmic Discussion: The limitations of shift-left and existing practices with Jitesh Gosai, Gwen Diagram, Parveen Khan and Barry Ehigiator.
- Cosmic Conversation: A holistic view of continuous quality with Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory 🤩
- Public Speaking and Procrastination with Benjamin Bischoff
- Leveling up test automation with Christine Pinto
- GitOps, Jenkins X & the Future of CI/CD with Kohsuke Kawaguchi
- W3C WebDriver Bidi, testing and you with Simon Stewart
- The role of leadership in driving test automation success, The role of AI in test automation success and Behavioural testing with Mehmet Engin
- How do you open the doors of a tester's Postman workspace with Swathika Visagn
- Visual Regression Testing with VRT with Andy Sockett
Have a talk idea? Submit one today. If something doesn’t fit within our current events schedule we can record it with you and publish it on the MoT site.
🎧 This Week in Testing podcast
- Episode 63: Bamboo, Jenkins, Playwright, exploratory testing, Jmeter, memes, LLMs, flakiness, The Chimp Paradox
- Episode 64: Interview issues and tips, the value of networking, visual regression, influencing terminology, blockchain performance testing, unfair hiring practices.
- Episode 65: Wins of the week, virtual and in-person conferences, tips and strategies when organising events, self-taught learning
- Episode 66: Career growth, quality resources, starting quality conversations, meetups, quality coaching, continuous quality.
- Episode 67: Interviewing testers, discussing risks, debugging, building and scaling communities of practice, leadership, UX testing insights.
🔥 Hot topics
Join the conversation on The Club, our dedicated forum for all testing professionals and beyond.
- What’s your prediction for software testing & quality engineering in 2025?
- 📚 W is for […]
- Is a career switch to Quality Assurance Engineer worth it?
- What do you learn from Site Reliability Engineers?
- What one test artefact example and story can you share?
- How do you tackle Schema validation and how often do you do it?
- How's your year in testing been?
- What are your dev:qa ratios?
- Can we talk about quality “engineering”?
- Do you describe yourself as a Quality Engineer?
- The community reflect on 2024
- What’s your current definition of software testing? Seek inspiration and then add your definition to the glossary.
🆙 Product and Community updates
- This Year in MoT. A look at what Team MoT has shipped in 2024
- New badges are available to earn on your MoT Profile page, including TestBash Trailblazer, TestBash Speaker, MoT Streak, Scholarship Hero, Career Champion, Testing Scholar and more!
- Early days yet we’ve started a new look community-driven glossary. Professional members can add their definitions. How cool!
- Folks can now flag Club posts as AI-generated. There’s no value or place for AI topic posts and replies.
🎡 Continuous Call for Contributions
Contributing to the testing community is a positive way to support your career and the careers of others. Unsure how? There are many ways for you to contribute and be rewarded.
Look out for specific requests in the "Help MoT" channel on the MoT Slack, particularly requests for contributing to the MoT-STEC. ✨
There are 39 ways to contribute to the community to earn a community star badge and the list is growing. More info on that is coming soon.
🤝 Let's connect
We're committed to connecting testers no matter what challenges the world brings us. Here are the safe and inspiring spaces we provide and curate for the software testing, QA and quality engineering people: MoT Slack, Threads, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Instagram, The Club, TikTok and Mastodon.
Join the MoT Slack to chat with the team and the community. Log into My MoT, select "My Slack" and "Join MoT Slack". It’s a great way to connect with fellow professionals.
🎁 Recommend the Scholarship Fund
Ministry of Testing gifted our first scholarship in 2013. Since then, we've committed to matching all funds raised and donated by the community. Anyone can apply for our scholarship fund, which can be used towards a Professional Membership, Certification, or TestBash Conference. Know someone who would benefit? Share the scholarship page and encourage them to apply.
🧭 Boundary test how far you can take your career
What's Ministry of Testing Professional Membership all about? A look inside at how we're supporting the software testing and quality engineering industry.
♾️ Simplicity with Unlimited Membership
A lot is going on at Ministry of Testing and our goal is to make it as easy as possible for you to access everything we do. We’ve seen how much of a stumbling block getting sign-off for budgets can be. To address this we’ve packaged everything up into one annual, much-reduced price and Unlimited membership. What do we mean by ‘everything’?
- Everything included in your professional membership plus
- Attend any TestBash
- Get certified with any of our 3 Test Automation Certification Courses
- Be the first to access and get certified with our Software Testing Essentials Certificate
- Any certification, event or TestBash we launch in the future.
That’s over £3,000 in value for just £1,499 (+ tax) a year. Go Unlimited. ♾️
👋 That’s all for now. Have a good month and we’ll see you around the community.
Simon Tomes, Community Lead at Ministry of Testing
