🎓 The certification every software tester needs to get their career started
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
Kudos to Tristan Lombard, Cassandra H. Leung, Barry Ehigiator, Ady Stokes, Elizabeth Zagroba, Jesse Berkeley, Alessandra Moreira, Nataliia Burmei, Ashutosh Mishra, Maddy Kilsby-McMurray, Scott Kenyon and Christine Pinto for contributing to last week's wonderful The Testing Planet episode. There were many insights about testing, getting hired, interviewing and onboarding. Recordings will soon be available to all professional members.
Join the next The Testing Planet online community gathering to level up your Continuous Quality skills and knowledge. Episode Seven: The community's guide to Continuous Quality. Wednesday, 27 November 2024.
"I’m happy to share that I’ve obtained a new certification: MoT Advanced Certificate in Test Automation from Ministry of Testing! 🚀" Bug congrats, Ross Aubrey-Smith.
MoT Auckland is go for the 12th of November with speaker Mei Reyes-Tsai. Then: Automate, automate, automate! Now: AI, AI, AI! Note the date change for MoT York. It's now on the 5th of December. 🇳🇿 🇬🇧
Ben Dowen celebrates his MoT profile and Rahul Parwal adds his MoT community contributions to LinkedIn. 👏
Get started with the butterfly app (Bluesky), we've created a starter pack to help you connect with other good testing people. 🦋
BREWT are looking for a host venue. Can you help Beren?
Ady Stokes celebrates his wins of the week. What are yours?
"Was great to get involved in the Ministry Of Testing This Week In Testing at lunchtime today, lots of interesting topics were covered!" Join Neil Taylor and others at This Week in Testing.
Career Growth
Now hiring
- Role: Junior Tester. Location: Nottingham, 2 days a week in the office, via Rebel Recruiters.
- Role: Principal QA Engineer. Location: Manchester, via Searchability.
- Aaron Ingram is looking for new QA Test Engineer at Remarkable Group in Manchester or London. Thanks for sharing, Iziren Chima.
- Role: QA Manager. Portsmouth, Hampshire (Hybrid). Searchlight Cyber.
Open to work
- Kunle Abatan is open to work, looking for Quality Engineer, Test Engineer, Quality Assurance Analyst roles.
- Say hello to Mark Ingram, he's open to work.
- Ana Sousa is looking for QA Lead or Head of QA roles.
Are you open to work? Help us get a sense of the QA and software testing employment market.
How long should a CV be? asks Joseph Brannan.
As a software testing professional, would you describe yourself as a generalist or specialist?
What tips do you have for onboarding new hires?
How to introduce yourself in an interview with Mukta Sharma.
Essentials
🚀 MoT Software Testing Essentials Certificate is here! We’d like to introduce you to MoT-STEC: our Software Testing Essentials Certification, made in collaboration with the software testing professional members of the community.
99 essential resources to help software testers. Explore 99 must-know resources to elevate your skills and simplify your search for the best tools, methodologies, and insights.
Are companies prioritizing certifications over practical experience? asks Mariam Sargsyan.
Kim Ross shares what she's learning, one year into her Software Quality Engineer role.
How can a fresh tester estimate their tasks when a sprint starts? asks vilenguyentuong.
You can find problems in software for a living.
Risk
What risk analysis techniques do you use?
🌪️ RiskStorming is here! A guide and deck of cards to help explore risk analysis and quality strategy.
Quality
Neutral Quality: a meme, or is it more than that? Maaike Brinkhof shares thoughts on this important topic.
Automation
How much has automation reduced your manual testing? Joep Schuurkes shares his take.
James Wadley has earned an MoT Advanced Certificate in Test Automation. Bug congrats! 🏆
Here's a five-point plan to start automation testing courtesy of Mohammad Faisal Khatri.
Chrome Test Set Up with Sauce Labs Platform Configurator with Nikolay Advolodkin.
👋 New Course: Prompting for Testers
As Generative AI continues to gain popularity, knowing how to use it effectively can make a big difference in your daily testing tasks and long-term career goals. A key skill in making the most of this technology is prompt engineering—the practice of designing and refining prompts to get the best results from large language models (LLMs).
Exploratory testing
Callum Akehurst-Ryan wonders, is it really an edge case?
Reporting
Using metrics for test coverage reporting by Sam Connelly.
Shivahari P describes creating a custom pytest plugin for a better failure summary.
Bash Process Substitution: A Smarter Way to Compare Test Outputs by Irfan Mujagic.
Testability
Why we failed at testability by Jit Gosai.
AI
10 Ways Software Testers Can Thrive in an AI-Powered Future: Insights from Futurism by Barry Ehigiator.
The AI worry list! 😳
🌞 Is the AI future bright for software testing professionals?
Coding
What is Abstraction? Hiding the Complex, Showing the Essential by Miguel.
Nadia Soledad Cavalleri shares why 100% statement coverage does not guarantee 100% branch coverage.
Just for fun
Where's Bug and Cosmo?
How do DevOps teams stay cool? Katja Obring has the answer!
Tester Revelations. 😮
Share your memories with the community
🗓️ Events
New events are always added, so keep checking the events page for up-to-date info.
- Building product-specific test strategies that go beyond “best practices” Wed 30 Oct
- Cincinnati Meetup Thu 31 Oct
- Auckland Meetup Tue 12 Nov
- Tester Obsolescence: How to Compete in a Modern QA Job Market Tue 12 Nov
- Episode Seven: The community's guide to Continuous Quality Wed 27 Nov
- Cincinnati Meetup Thu 28 Nov
- York Meetup 5 Dec
- Coventry Meetup Thu 5 Dec
- TestBash Brighton 2025 Wed 1 Oct 2025 🤩
🗞️ Industry News
- QA myth busting: quality is the testers' responsibility by Vitaly Sharovatov & Rease Rios
- Advanced Strategies for Manual Software Testing by Hannah Son
- AI in exploratory testing: benefits and challenges by Mariana Santos
💡 Continuous Call for Contributions
Contributing to the testing community is a positive way to support your career. Unsure how to do it? There are many ways for you to contribute and be rewarded. Here's the bonus: Sharing your knowledge supports everyone's career growth!
We are now accepting abstracts for talks and workshops for TestBash Brighton 2025. Submit an idea.
Look out for specific requests in the Help MoT channel on the MoT Slack.