Bug congrats: MoT Weekly – Issue 499

Nearly there! How was your 2024? Join events and discover many ways to learn and contribute with 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. See you in 2025. 🎉

— Simon Tomes, Community Lead at Ministry of Testing

Community

Phew, this year has been something! Here's a look at our 2024: This Year in MoT. 🚀

How do companies celebrate testing? The BBC have an annual Testmas!

What have you learned recently? Melissa Fisher reflects.

Catch up on episode 65 of This Week in Testing! Christine Pinto, Mariem SAFI, James Wadley, Demi Van Malcot and Asma Muzammil discussed wins of the week, missed bugs, internal QA conferences, and self-taught learning.

MoT Athens Lean Coffee in Allwyn Lottery Solution. 🇬🇷

Peet Michielsen is grateful for his community cert and Alistair Goodall celebrates his Community Certification on LinkedIn. Give it a like!

Bug congrats to Manish Saini for his Community Star badge. ⭐️

Adam Pownall is new to testing and joined the Club from the "Introduction to software development and testing" course. How about saying hi?

Join MoT Auckland to learn about mobile application automated testing using open-source tools. Thanks for organising, Teresa Weatherall. And nice one Melissa Rocks for setting up a networking event for MoT Sheffield. 🇳🇿 🇬🇧

Have you heard about Epic Test Quest? Community Star, Christine Pinto, is up to something good!

Check out your shiny new professional member badge on your public profile.

Hooray! We just launched a new community badge. The Above & Beyond badge. 🚀

When your garden office is a bit on the (very) chilly side there is nothing better than putting your new Ministry of Testing beanie to the test 😁.

In 2024 we dished out 519 Community Star badges. Thank you for creating a helpful community vibe and for supporting your fellow community members with your positive contributions. 🤩

Career Growth 

Job moves

• Lisi Hocke lands a new job as a security engineer at DocuWare. Bug congrats! 🏆

• Dave Higgins is starting as a Test Lead at Hastings Direct. Bug congrats! 🏆

Now hiring

• Sr. QAT Analyst. Bharathi S is looking for one Functional Tester and one Non-functional Tester to join the Civil Service.

• 2i continue to grow their Quality Engineering Practice. They are hiring a Quality Engineer - Java.

• Atom bank is hiring a Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET), remote first or hybrid, Durham, County Durham. United Kingdom.

• Hiring? Advertise on the MoT job board for free. ➕

Open to work

• Professional members can now set their MoT Profile to open to work. See who is open to work.

Looking for a mentor? Check out our growing list of people available to help. 🤝

How's your year in testing been?

Hannah Reynolds offers handy advice for job seekers.

Veerle Verhagen shares her wins for 2024, what were yours?

Essentials

"Yay my team member has purchased the MoT software testing essential course from Ministry of Testing at HALF PRICE. Amazing. I feel it's really going to help them." — Melissa Fisher

Software Testing Essentials Certificate (STEC) new module release: Module 5 - The Struggles of Software Testing. It covers so much! 

• It tackles the common struggles and misconceptions in software testing

• Explores metrics with Lisa Crispin and Kat Obring

• Dives into industry standards with Rahul Parwal

• Unpacks how budgets and user expectations influence quality with Ady Stokes.

• Hanisha Arora and Ady Stokes bust myths like “anyone can test”

• Callum Akehurst-Ryan, Jenna Charlton, Nicola Lindgren, and Mahathee Dandibhotla share their perspectives on how testing shapes quality

• Kat Obring explains testing’s integration across the SDLC

• Ady Stokes wraps up with an exploration of how testing varies between methodologies like Agile, DevOps, and Waterfall

• Start exploring now to deepen your understanding and tackle testing challenges with confidence!

Continuous Quality

Stuart Day makes his first steps towards writing Achieving Continuous Quality.

Beyond Shift-Left: 5 Key Reasons Software Testers Should Embrace a Centred Strategy, continuing on from The Testing Planet on Continuous Quality, Barry Ehigiator explores the shifting trend.

A note from Lisa Crispin: "Want some reading and learning over the holiday season, and prefer a printed book? Hooray, the paperback version of Janet Gregory and my Holistic Testing: Weave Quality Into Your Product book is available."

Quality Engineering

How exciting to see Melissa Fisher give Quality Engineering some love.

Join Exploring Quality Engineering - The Testing Planet Ep 08. We'll introduce quality engineering as a concept and dive into quality engineering models, systems, people, pitfalls and possibilities.

Can we talk about quality “engineering”? Still a spicy topic! 🌶️

Systems Thinking

It's ok not to like existing approaches, that's how change comes about. Patrick Prill explores not liking The 5 Whys.

"There is no “context” in systems thinking."

Explore this course: Prompting for Testers

A key skill in making the most of AI is prompt engineering—the practice of designing and refining prompts to get the best results from large language models (LLMs). Join hundreds who have already enrolled.

Exploratory Testing

Exploratory testing is a learned skill. Or as it turns out, it's a set of nine skills.

Automation

Often, as a test engineer, you have to manifest and fix flaky tests regardless of how great your test automation is. Andrey Enin shares a technique.

The role of leadership in driving test automation success with Mehmet Engin.

Tanith Fraenkl-Rietti Milloy earned a MoT Foundation Certificate in Test Automation. Bug congrats! 🏆

Flipping the Switch: Automating Feature Flag Testing by Irfan Mujagić.

What is behavioural testing?

Congrats to Kailash Pathak for publishing his book "Web Automation Testing Using Playwright".

What’s your most ‘this can’t be real’ moment in test automation? asks 🕵Ioan Solderea.

Microservices Testing Cycles Are Too Slow by Arjun Iyer.

Measurement

Measuring Developer Productivity and the Clock of the Long Now with Ian Smith & Ash Winter.

Unit Testing

Should testers write unit tests? Sebastian Viquez shares their thoughts.

Coding

What are Arrays in Java? Mukta Sharma explains.

API Testing

API Test framework builders, how do you tackle Schema validation and how often do you do it? Ashutosh Mishra would like to know.

Tooling

🛠️ Tool of the Week: Testmo - Test Management. Manage all your test cases, sessions & automation in Testmo. Powerful unified test management: lightning-fast UI, rich reports & integrations. Works with Jira, GitHub, GitLab & many more.

Unlocking Playwright’s Potential: Features for daily basis with Kostiantyn Teltov.

Team setup

An old thread that reminds us that there are many different team setups: What are your dev:qa ratios?

AI

AI was supposed to make the UK benefits system more efficient. Instead it’s brought bias and hunger.

The role of AI in test automation success with Mehmet Engin.

7 Free AI Tools For Software Testers by Daniel Knott.

Brian Fehrman explores Pitting AI Against AI: Using PyRIT to Assess Large Language Models (LLMs).

Dark patterns

Dark patterns are a risk: "The Federal Trade Commission is sending refunds totaling more than $72 million to consumers who were tricked by Epic Games, maker of the popular video game Fortnite, into making unwanted purchases."

Just for fun

What's your favourite 2024 bugs meme? 😅 🐞 

Ambassadors Briefing Before TestBash

🗓️ Events

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

• Newcastle Meetup Tue 21 Jan 🇬🇧

• Manchester Meetup Thu 23 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 🤩

🗞️ Industry News

• How AI is Transforming QA Processes Today by Hannah Son

• 10 best test management tools in 2025 by Rease Rios

• Shared context, shielded context: testers and developers writing tests together by Natalia Poliakova and Mikhail Lankin

• Accelerate Test Design for smart and agile testing with Xray and YEST by Smartesting

💡 Continuous Call for Contributions

Contributing to the testing community is a great way to support your career. There are many ways for you to contribute and be rewarded. 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