Community love for Ministry of Testing

Last Saturday I had a mentoring session and my mentee mentioned they didn’t know Ministry of Testing is so much more than just a testing resources website. MoT is a community of wonderful, passionate and supportive people that help you learn, expand, grow and socialise through different events and learning techniques. Ministry of Testing is about human connections that drive values and impact.

I really appreciate Ministry of Testing. They are very supportive in sharing work from those in the community and lift other people up. Thank you for all you do!

Great conversations at the Test Exchange today with the Ministry of Testing, my first time using Butter 🧈 as a community tool and I really liked it. I met and connected with some awesome testers from all around the world, engineering managers and people, curious from all walks of life. Community is so important for these reasons, learning, experimenting, lifting others and reaching out to help. #community #softwaretesting #software #quality

Just wanted to say a massive thank you to all at Ministry of Testing for their efforts in 30 Days of #AI in #Testing challenge. Its a fabulous way to learn new concepts, whether you have a lot of time to commit to it or a little. Each of the daily posts on the Club has a ton of information and creative flair from so many contributors. Predicting the future is a game that is designed to make you look foolish but you can approach the future with the right intent. For me, we should use AI to maximise what great testing looks like over squeezing efficiencies out of what we already do. As testers, we can give a positive vision of how testing and AI can work together, while retaining a healthy skepticism. All my answers to each of the challenges are here on my blog by the way, split into smaller chunks, as I actually wrote nearly 15000 words on the topic, with some help from Claude!

What a way to end an amazing #TestBash .... thank you so much Antonella Scaravilli for your talk opening up about how critical thinking has helped your mental health. Your talk hit a cord inside me and has given me so many ideas!

Great couple of days down in Brighton last week for the Ministry of Testing #TestBash. Plenty of insightful talks, engaging workshops and fun activities! 🤩 Special mention to Bill Matthews for his fantastic workshop on ‘Testing and Evaluating LLM applications’ followed by a great talk on ‘Responsible AI’👏 Excited to feedback to the team our learnings and implement some new standards as we move forward in our AI journey 🤖

So a week on from TestBash and I think I've finally recovered and my Social Battery has recharged...Just in time for a short holiday before returning to the task of finding a new project/role to inspire me. #TestBash remains one of my favourite conferences to attend and speak at - there is something about the community around Ministry of Testing and TestBash that many other conferences just don't have. I think it's the focus on community-first rather than conference-first that is the key. Despite being a fairly seasoned conference speaker, I was anxious about attending - it was my first conference since 2019 so wasn't sure how I would cope being around that many people. After a warm welcome by the awesome TestBash Ambassadors and a number of other familiar faces (the irrepressible Gwen Diagram, Daniel Billing, Vernon Richards, Christopher Chant, Danny Dainton to name but a few) I felt more comfortable. Day 1 was the AI focused day and I missed most of the sessions as I was presenting a workshop in the morning and a talk in the afternoon, plus many hallway chats about the challenges of testing AI/ML systems I would have dearly loved to attend other sessions and talks but no doubt will catch up with the talks I missed on MoT Pro at some point. I finished the day by watching the famous 99 second talks - something fairly unique to TestBash and always worthwhile. Sometimes it's silly, sometimes it serious, sometimes its insightful but it's always worth attending. Overall it was a fun day and I even enjoyed the evening social although by that time my Social Battery was definitely low. Day 2 I sat mostly in the main auditorium listening to fantastic talks across on a range of topics, many of which resonated with me and my experiences. Emna Ayadi talking about Quality Coaching Barry Ehigiator talking about Self Awareness Katja Obring talking about teaching Devs the Testing mindset. Melissa Fisher talking about metrics & dashboards Eirini Kefala talking about Empathy and Test Leadership One personal stand out for me was the talk from Rahul Parwal on Productizing yourself and the quote "Who knows you is more important than who you know" (from James Clear) really struck a chord with me...I've had it the wrong way around and really must do more become more known and share my ideas. I took a break from the talks to provide coding assistance at the Coding Interview workshop being run by Ben Dowen - not that Ben needed any assistance - it was a well run workshop and enjoyed being part of it. I finished my TestBash with the 99 second talks and watch a huge number of people standing up and giving a talk. Well done to them all! It take a huge amount of courage to stand up and talk for the first time and to do that at the largest testing conference in the UK is amazing! I went to the Post TestBash social but my Social Battery was so empty I didn't stay long.

Great day at #TestBash definitely some very nice speakers, for first time attendance definitely recommend it. Wish I attended some of the workshops though that’s the plan for next year, keep up the good work!

It was amazing to be back in Brighton at #testbash with the Postman team. We shared many new features like Postman Vault, Postbot and the Package Library which all help to facilitate team based API Collaboration 🚀 I even got to showcase Postman Flows on the big stage - that was very cool! 😍 If you'd like to hear more about those features, ping us on the Community Forum!! ❤️ lnkd.in/dYATGnc

@ministryoftest A friend of mine said that MoT has done more for the testing than any other community (ISTQB, wink, wink) and I think he is right, this is the most valuable resource for testers nowadays!