With summer in full swing, we welcome Thomas Rinke to the island, to talk about his career in testing, talking through some of the challenges and achievements associated with guiding teams along their agile journey, from both a tester and manager’s perspective.

We also talk further about the concept of “whole team quality”, the joy of exploratory testing, the importance of promoting team diversity, and how we can each help to elevate new voices.

In an episode recorded in early July, Neil makes some eerily accurate predictions for the outcome of the rescheduled Euro 2020 tournament, and there are some rock/pop-infused musical selections that include the first appearance of a James Bond theme song.

This episode is sponsored by Provar: Provar is the leading expert in Salesforce testing focused on accelerating innovation within the Salesforce ecosystem. They provide a robust test automation solution and deep Salesforce expertise to help you deliver scalable and repeatable tests to enhance release agility and maximize your Salesforce investment. To learn more visit provartesting.com.

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Welcome to episode 2 of TestSphere Roulette. Joining Simon at the roulette table are 2 more testing superstars:

Russell Craxford (@r_crax) - Head of Quality Management at Saggezza

Hanna Schlander (@hannaschlander) - Quality Catalyst at Jayaway

The wheel threw out some really interesting topics for conversation:

Curse of Knowledge - Patterns

Boundary Testing - Techniques

Curious - Feelings

Russell plugged the Testing Peers podcast which he is a co-host of (along with Simon), which can be found here - https://testingpeers.com

Both Hanna and Russell mentioned that they are looking for testers for their companies, if you wish to find out more, get in touch with either of them via their linkedIn pages:

Hanna - https://www.linkedin.com/in/hanna-schlander-42a72554/

Russell - https://www.linkedin.com/in/russell-craxford/

Thank you to Russell and Hanna for their great discussions and to the Ministry of Testing for supporting the podcast

If you wish to find out more about TestSphere, check out RiskstormingOnline.com or find the card decks on the MoT Store

Sounds and Music courtesy of Zapsplat.com

Thank you for listening and we look forward to seeing you at the roulette table again soon.  You can follow TestSphere Roulette on Twitter.

On this episode of the Ministry of Testing Podcast, Mike chats with Eduardo Fischer about his article on Ministry of Testing: Moving From Software Development To QA: A Road Less Travelled 

He discovered his passion for testing during his time as a back-end developer and eventually made testing his full-time job. His hobbies are developing Alexa skills and making models for his 3D printer.

You can find Eduardo on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/mwlite/in/eduardo-fischer-dos-santos

This podcast is sponsored by Sauce Labs

White Paper - Software Testing in a Post Pandemic World

The global COVID-19 pandemic has changed the landscape of work. With more employees working from home, companies had to quickly transform their digital infrastructure to accommodate the trend and support remote work. Even after the pandemic is over, the changes will be long-lasting. Moving forward, software companies need to have the digital infrastructure as well as the policies and procedures in place to enable their workforce to work efficiently and safely no matter where in the world their employees are. Read the full Sauce Labs white paper here!

This month’s special guest is Beth Marshall, who joins us on the island to talk about how we can advance our careers as testers, ranging from learning how to build (and measure) your reputation within your team, how to create a test automation portfolio, finding ways in which your experience can help you to give back to the community, and talking about the processes involved with creating workshop content.

We talk a bit about TestBash Home (even though it hadn’t happened when we recorded), the importance of celebrating everyday stories more than elevating people to heroes, our thoughts about the new audio-based social media platform Racket, and Beth finally teases an announcement from Neil about his new job (and how it ties in to a previous Testers’ Island episode).

Beth’s musical selections (both the ones that made the cut, and the ones that only just missed out) contain some choice gems, ranging from pop delights to motown classics, and she becomes the first person to select a Eurovision entry.

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Welcome to Episode 1 of TestSphere Roulette. Joining Simon at the roulette table for this episode, we have 3 awesome Testers:

Chris Armstrong - QA Strategy Consultant @ Provar Testing (@christovskia)

Rachel Sherratt - Head of QA @ AccessPay (https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachelsherratt91/)

Shey Crompton - Senior Quality Engineer @ Prima Assicurazioni (@sheymouse)

The Roulette Wheel chose the following 3 random cards for discussion:

User Friendliness - Quality Aspect

Rejection - Feelings

Pair Testing - Techniques

Future events mentioned on the pod were:

Testbash Home (https://www.ministryoftesting.com/events/testbash-home-2021)

Testing Voices (https://huddle.eurostarsoftwaretesting.com/testing-voices/)

Thank you to Shey, Rachel and Chris for their great discussions and to the Ministry of Testing for supporting the podcast. If you wish to find out more about TestSphere, check out RiskstormingOnline.com or find the card decks on the MoT Store.

Want to join us on the podcast. Fill out the TestSphere Roulette guest form.

In this episode of the Ministry of Testing Podcast, Mike chats to Beth Marshall and Louise Harney about Community, covering

Beth has been testing for about 13 years and is currently a senior test lead at Smoothwall. She loves being in the testing community, only really properly joined during lockdown but am now a massive advocate for. She has followed Louise's journey closely so its super excited to get a chance to speak with Louise!

Beth can be found on twitter @Beth_AskHer and via beththetester.com

Louise can be found on twitter via @HarneyTester and blogs at harneytester.wordpress.com

Listen further to find out about  how it's important to "Find Your Tribe", "Add value to the Community" and "interact and provide feedback"

Mabl is an intelligent test automation platform for Agile teams. It’s the only SaaS solution that tightly integrates automated end-to-end testing into the entire development lifecycle.

With mabl it's easy to create, execute, and maintain reliable tests, allowing software teams to increase test coverage, speed up development and improve application quality. Try it free at mabl.com/trial!

This month, we’re joined by Simon Tomes, who in a complete coincidence has just begun a role as CommunityBoss at Ministry of Testing! Simon talks to us about the many different hats that he’s worn in his career, including being the co-founder of TestBuddy, a tool to support the capturing and sharing of exploratory testing notes.

In a show which is a useful companion to the previous episode, we get deep into the nitty-gritty of exploratory testing: How do you estimate timeboxes if you’re testing something completely new? What categories of information do you capture during exploratory testing charters? And how do you engage others with the output of your sessions?

Along the way, Simon takes a (very) deep dive into five songs which all feature elements of exploration, teaching us elements of music theory and trying not to mention the time that Prince choreographed a Batman-themed dance routine.

This episode is sponsored by Provar: Struggling with the complexities of building and maintaining tests given the impact of localization (running tests that work for various languages, time zones, etc.)? Learn more about simplifying test automation for global companies in this complimentary white paper: https://bit.ly/32xyIri

Podcast Links:

Simon Tomes joins Ministry of Testing

TestBuddy

YouTube: Simon’s Exploratory Testing Conversations series

YouTube: Simon’s conversation with Lee Hawkins

Simon’s blog: Encourage new voices

Tim’s Twitter Listening Party

Explore Galore: 30 Tips to Supercharge your Exploratory Testing Efforts

Wikipedia: Pomodoro Technique

YouTube: Prince - Batdance

Categorising notes with PQIP (Problems, Questions, Ideas, Praise)

Twitter: Rajit Singh

YouTube: Let’s Explore, Episode 4: Neil explores with TestBuddy

Simon’s “bold boast”: Welcome to Adventures in Community Building

YouTube: Bernard Purdie explains the Purdie Shuffle

Simon on Twitter (@simon_tomes)

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Listen to and subscribe to this podcast on iTunes and SoundCloud

Sign up to be a guest on the show

Testers' Island Discs playlist on Spotify

Testers' Island Discs reading list on Goodreads

Follow us on Twitter

Mark is joined in this off the cuff podcast by Gem Hill, Alsa Tabatabei, Ben Dowen and Lee Marshall to talk about the thorny topic of Quality. The group discuss this trickiness around defining Quality, why context matters and what are the best snacks to eat.

This podcast is sponsored by TestProject. TestProject and its community built the world's largest free test automation addons library you have got to explore! With over 1,500 ready-to-use automation actions, you are in for a whole new world of automation testing. No need to develop common testing scenarios from scratch anymore, now you can simply search for any action you need for testing straight from a fully-fledged automation Addons library, contributed by the community, for the community - and supporting any web, Android or iOS app, helping you empower test cases and deliver quality at speed.

Show notes

Adam talks to Lisi Hocke and Simon Berner about pairing, how to do it right, it's benefits and potential pitfalls - and their upcoming hands-on course in July.

Click here to learn more about Lisi and Simon's training

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With thanks to our sponsor:

Carlos Kidman talks with Venkat Ramakrishnan about Pairwise Testing. Venkat's course, "Be Wise, Do Pairwise", covers what it is while providing hands-on examples of why and how to use this powerful technique for better testing and coverage.

Enrol for Venkat's course on "Be Wise, Do Pairwise" today.