We're not gonna lie, it's been a tough year for Ministry of Testing. We've had a real mess to clean up behind the scenes, but we're ending it on a positive note.
We took a moment to reflect on the new things we've done this year as a way to remind ourselves of how far we've come.
And what can I say? We've been pushing for action and change and the team has delivered!
Infact, one of the challenges we've had this year is communicating everything that we've been shipping.
New things in MoT in 2024
The TLDR;
Polls
Radar
TikTok
Badges
Memes
MoTadon
404 talks
Memories
Collections
Rebranding
MoT Profiles
RiskStorming
30 Days of AI
Testing Trends
Find Bluesky users
TestBash back home
Double email list size
Test Automation Cert
Prompting for Testers
MoT Partner Program
New swag in our store
Unlimited membership
Enhanced MoT Weekly
Delivered MoT Monthly
MoT revamped glossary
️ Community Star Badges
Community Certifications
✏️ Great articles every week
Above and Beyond Badges
100k followers on LinkedIn
🍪 We now have a Cookie planet
☎️ Hundreds of community calls
Slack for Professional Members
Grew LinkedIn newsletter to 54k
10k active members on The Club
Continuous Call for Contributions
Print version of The Testing Planet
Revamped and more Meetup groups
Daily publishing, more often than not!
Software Testing Essentials Cert (STEC)
TWiT as a podcast, and now on Crowdcast
🦆 SpaceDuck, SpaceSeagull and Bug mascots
Hundreds of Open To Work LinkedIn reposts
OpenTo [work/teach/speak/mentor/apprenticeship]
Events page, new and improved to include meetups too
Over £15k in Scholarship Funding given back to the community
The Testing Planet – Important news and many topic deep dives
This Week in Testing dedicated community, 100+ people on stage. Several thousand listeners.
🥂 Thank you to the community, we couldn't do it without you. We're optimistic for 2025!
Our mission is to promote and elevate the standards of software testing, QA and quality engineering. Let’s go!
The longer expanded version
A bit of an explanation of each thing to give more understanding:
- Polls: This was the foundation of us becoming more research focused. We started creating polls on our forum and LinkedIn. We then used the results and comments to write a Testing Trend (see further below).
- Radar: We created a page that autofeeds in content based on RSS feeds we have collected and organised. See it in action. We had the RSS feeds for years, but it hadn't been created into anything concrete. Seeing the archive is for paying customers only.
- TikTok: We finally hired someone who could do TikTok and other social videos. Growth in new platforms is always slow, but it's cool to see us expressing ourselves in short form video. We hope to create a process to create and re-use video for our own platform. As I like to say: I don't want the social networks to have all the fun.
- Badges: We've had a few basic badges for a while, but are only starting now in earnest at adding more. It took us a while to make a few decisions and get some designs sorted. They're built into our platform and we can create them according to whatever logic we want. Exciting!
- Memes: This is another nod to not letting social networks have all the fun. People share memes on social and memes are educational. We'd rather build up a collection on our own site. Any registered member can add one. See MoT memes in action.
- MoTadon: We set up a Mastodon server, an experiment to explore the use of the Fediverse. See it in action.
- 404 talks: What we call a version of our short form talks. 404 ties into the humour of errors for software testers where the video cannot be longer than 4 minutes and 4 seconds. Members can submit talks ondemand or sometimes as part of an event. They end up on our website for paid members to view. Here's an example.
- Memories: This is our take on the likes of Instagram, Memories are a place to share photos and very short videos. It is also our belief that communities create history and this is one way for the community share their experience. Any member can upload.
- Collections: We have lots of content, it becomes a challenge to find all the content so we created a way for paid members to group content into a collection. Team MoT use it a lot, for example, to group videos from one event into a collection. You can see it in action.
- Rebranding: Our branding was a mess. There was no cohesiveness. There was a half-assed attempt at a rebrand that I had inherited. I hated it and struggled to look at it every day. So we rebranded and went with a space theme. Whilst we have the foundations in place, it's a never ending project where we are building out a planet. It's so fun to keep adding new stuff in. We just added a Cookie Planet to our collection!
- MoT Profiles: We should made profiles years ago! They've made our life so much easier in the short few months that we've had them. A simple example is when we review submissions, we can now see people's profiles, where they are active online and what they've contributed. It's a great member snapshot that supports us in raising people's profiles. We have many ideas on how to expand this in the future. You can view my profile here.
- RiskStorming: A card deck and a guide that we sell in collaboration with a long standing member of the community. View it in our shop.
- 30 Days of AI: A challenge to learn and so something around AI + software testing. It was an intense month!
- Testing Trends: This is part of us becoming more research driven. I've long said there is gold in community and the conversations that are held. We used polls as an initiating effort to then write articles on certain topics. We're still early days into this project. It's for paid members only.
- Find Bluesky users: now that we have user profiles, we created a way to create a filter on people who have Bluesky accounts. This encourages users to update their profiles. See it in action.
- TestBash back to Brighton: conferences are different and hard since the pandemic. Before I came back they had been moving location, originally they were hosted in the same location every year, which also happens to be where I live. We've now gone back to only hosting it in Brighton. We have space to grow, which is what our goal is now. We hosted 550 people in September.
- Double email list size: our email list had been painfully neglected and culled. We doubled the size of it in 2024.
- Test Automation Cert: In January we launched our first series of certifications focused on Test Automation. Have a peek.
- Prompting for Testers: an ondemand course for paid members only. Have a peek.
- MoT Partner Program: a big part of my role has been to simplify and create more value, how we partner with companies has been one of these projects. It's early days yet and designed to be as little work as possible to maintain for us and our customers. Have a peek.
- New swag in our store: New brand, means new swag. Have a look at our shop. This doesn't really make us money, but people can get branded and fun swag ondemand. Browse our shop.
- Unlimited membership: A more expensive membership package that includes all our certifications and our TestBash conference. This is an attempt to make it easier for people to buy from us. See what it looks like.
- Enhanced MoT Weekly: Our weekly community newsletter that shares things across the ecosystem. Improved with more subscribers. Emailed out via LinkedIn. And a better curation process. It's been a good year, with both people viewing, opening it and growth in general. View the archive.
- Delivered MoT Monthly: A roundup of everything we've published and shipped in a given month. It's early days yet and is a nice reminder of how much we do every month. Here's an example.
- MoT revamped glossary: This is so new, it's not quite live yet. It should be very soon! I'm excited about this! We added the initial definitions, which the community help write. Then any registered member can add more definitions to it. This is inspired by Urban Dictionary and to stop testers arguing about definitions. 🤣️
- Community Star Badges: we've been manually awarding members Community Star badges. We have a wonderful process for it, led by Simon, managed in Tana. We now have a list of 40 or so reasons we award a star. We award them to members via our forum (Discourse). People love them and often share them on LinkedIn. We've awarded 519 of them! (Yes, we have separate badges on our actual MoT Platform, but we weren't technically ready to use our platform when we started with our Community Stars initiative, using Discourse was a good enough way to manage it, get going and not to be slowed down).
- Community Certifications: we have a philosophy of community flywheels and iterations. We had wanted to do Community Certifications for a while, we even announced them without a concrete plan! We then realised the Community Stars was the perfect way to manage them. If people get 5 Community Stars then they get awarded a Community Certificate which also appears on their profile page. It's been great source of community love.
- Great articles every week: Whilst publishing articles wasn't new, publishing them weekly, to a much higher standard and having a healthy queue has been a blessing. Anyone can submit, we pay writers or they can put the money into our scholarship bucket. You can see them here.
- Above and Beyond Badges: This is an iteration of the Community Star badges where we noted that some members simply go above and beyond others. This was created to give them recognition. Have a look.
- 100k followers on LinkedIn: Yes, it's just a number, but it's also a signal of our hard work. View our LinkedIn page.
- 🍪 We now have a Cookie planet: Yes cookies, nom, nom. An article was written about testing cookies. Our designer created a cookie planet. And yes, we'll be re-using it in the future to help 'design our planet'.
- Hundreds of community calls: These calls are rooted in our “Always be” approach to community. Always be inviting. Always be asking. Always be thanking. No, we didn't count them, but we've been way more intentional with connecting with our people. This could be events, creating content, recordings, certification content, ondemand courses, articles, testing trends, general chit-chats, cries for help and so much more. The calls are not just by our 'community team' either, it's the whole company that has been involved to varying degrees.
- Slack for Professional Members: for reasons to hard to explain, we had a community Slack that we closed down. We started a new one, this time for customers and collaborators. It feels really nice, light weight and easy to manage.
- Grew LinkedIn newsletter to 54k: I wouldn't really call LinkedIn Newsletters real newsletter, we are at their mercy with their platform changes. However, it's been a great way to connect with the community and tag people into what we write. We've refined our processes to send 3 items a week. 😅
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10k active members on The Club: Simon gave me this number, and in Simon we trust, hah. The Club is our forum and still going and growing! In addition to generally supporting the community with questions, our main internal goal with The Club is to connect it with other projects were are working on. This ties in with our philosophy of nothing in isolation.
For example, we ask a question on our forum related to a lesson in STEC and it helps a lesson contributor frame an article for a lesson. They can use direct quotes from the replies and our processes are getting better to award people community stars when we quote people. Visit The Club. - Continuous Call for Contributions (CCC): We definitely threw some things in the bin and set them on fire this year. One such thing was our call for conference submissions. There were too many good ideas that didn't quite make it to our TestBash conference yet would have been great in another format. So we moved to a Continous Call for Submissions where we review content continuously, people can express a preference, many preferences, or simply anything! As a team at MoT we then gather weekly to work our way through the list. We've not hit inbox zero for this yet! 😅 View our CCC page.
- Print version of The Testing Planet: We brought back our printed version of The Testing Planet. We first did this in 2012. It felt great to do it again. This time we focused on distributing it at our conference and also shipped it to paid customers and meetup organisers. Check out some photos.
- Revamped and more Meetup groups: It's been a challenge post COVID, but our meetups groups are growing, we now have 47 MoT Meetup groups! And the rebranding of them was no easy task. View the list.
- Daily publishing, more often than not! With the rebrand was also a hug push towards publishing like a news outlet. What this means is that we usually ship at least one new thing a day, often it is multiple. It's been amazing to witness. We model our current design on the BBC, you may notice similarities!
- Software Testing Essentials Cert (STEC): I'm actually really excited about this and believe we're creating something really special and truly community focused. We have so many contributors for this, it's a mammoth task to make happen. There are 18 modules and we've shipped 5 of them so far. It's been available at a discount price until this coming Sunday. Have a peek, there's a nice short promo video too.
- This Week in Testing (TWiT): a LinkedIn audio show, then created as a podcast, and now on Crowdcast: We got 100+ people on stage, many of them as their first time speaking and several thousand listeners. It's been so good to see people connect on a weekly cadence. LinkedIn are killing audio spaces, so we've moved it over to Crowdcast. Link to the podcast.
- 🦆 SpaceDuck, SpaceSeagull and Bug mascots: Again, we love to have fun with the brand, we now have a SpaceDuck, SpaceSeagul and Bug mascot that we include and hide across everything we do. We even had a duck hunt at TestBash Brighton.
- Hundreds of Open To Work LinkedIn reposts: the employment market has been so difficult this year. We started a thing where we would share people who were open to work on LinkedIn and within our newsletter. This was actually a bit of an experiment of offering a similar feature via our MoT platform.
- OpenTo [work/teach/speak/mentor/apprenticeship]: This is where paid members can mark themselves as Open To something and they get added to a public browseable list. It's early days, but you can have a look.
- Events page, new and improved to include meetups too: we completely revamped our Events page and made a conscious effort to keep it up to date with our events plus meetup events. It's not an easy task!
- Over £15k in Scholarship Funding given back to the community: We like to say that if we succeed we invest money back into the community. Our scholarship fund is one such way to do that. This year we gave £15k worth of products to the community. View our scholarship page.
- The Testing Planet virtual events – Important news and many topic deep dives: we hosted seven virtual events, kind like a mini conference, each was 3-4 hours in length. They were experimental and after a year of doing them we've now come up with a design that means these events actually help us make something more. They are an event, but they are much more than that. They are research and short course creation too. It's exciting to be so efficient with our strategy!
Thanks for reading!
