Off the back of our successful This Year in Testing edition of This Week in Testing, we’re inspired to hear from you
2024 has been quite the ride for testers, QA people, quality engineers and quality leaders everywhere, and we’d love to hear how it’s been for you! Looking back on your year, share your thoughts on:
Celebrations: What wins are you most proud of?
Challenges: What tested you the most (pun intended)?
Learnings: What lessons will you carry into 2025?
Leave Behinds: What are you happy to leave in 2024?
Let’s make this a proper community moment—share your reflections below. Here’s to all the highs, lows, and growth we’ve had this year!
Celebrations: What wins are you most proud of?
Doing only 10% testing and 80% scripting, test-data generation products, automating, production system development;
Challenges: What tested you the most (pun intended)?
New business domain where trillions of dollars are passing through, using Excel, ancient systems, messy integrations and having to comply with multiple regulations.
Learnings: What lessons will you carry into 2025?
Care less about the product quality, and deadlines, and lack of people, it’s not mine to worry or manage.
Leave Behinds: What are you happy to leave in 2024?
Hopefully testing, and maybe going into Data integrations for a while. Not to understand that I won’t be testing, cause there will be a lot of it, the type and responsibility is different though.
Thanks for asking, @alexandramot. Always helpful to reflect.
I’ll start with a challenge cos I’ll get to the good stuff afterwards:
Challenges
Dealing with MoT being turned on its head for the better has been a big challenge that I’ve conquered. Rosie Sherry returned as CEO of MoT after Richard Bradshaw (the previous CEO) left MoT in a mess and was asked to leave MoT in 2023 due to several bad things he’d done which I can’t mention on this forum. While I can’t go into the detail I’d like to acknowledge how much of a challenge that’s been emotionally. Lots of guilt, anger, frustration. It’s not all been sunny and shiny. So the challenge has been to move past that and focus on what really matters. I feel proud of what we’ve achieved in 2024. MoT is a completely different company to what it was this time last year.
Celebration
There are many successes yet one that stands out is the success of This Week in Testing. Feels good to have been part of that. I feel like it’s a good part of the wider MoT community. So much shared and it’s sparked many ideas and reflections that have led to more things over the year. Love when others host too. They’ll be more of that in 2025.
Learned
Always be inviting, asking and thanking. These fundamental approaches are now embedded into everything I and MoT do. If you don’t ask or invite you’ll never know what’s possible. People can always say no or ignore you. I don’t take it personally. But when I do connect with people and they’re open to collaborating it’s the best feeling.
Leave behind
I gave up getting caught up in everything. It’s unhealthy. While my role requires me to be involved in many parts of this community I’ve given up trying to satisfy every community member. I can’t be involved in everything. And a lot of folks don’t get where we are going. So I’ve learnt to focus on people who get what we’re up to at MoT and we get what they’re up to too. Connecting over a shared ambition is the moment when good things happen and have happened and will continue to happen. Software Testing Essentials Certificate (STEC) is a good example of this.
The biggest win is my meetup attendance. I set myself the challenge to do 100 meetups in 2024 via meetup.com and I’ve currently done 131 and there is still a few to come!
Some nice bounties that I caught!
Some nice exploits that I found/created
I swapped employers, I went to work for a smaller consultancy company which gave me more of a “family” feeling.
People… always people
All the new tricks I found to test applications.
Doing things yourself, sometimes is better then doing things in group.
That meetups and networking is waaaaaay better for knowledge sharing then learning an online course.
I hope UI automation, I’m not a fan of it, I’m not convinced by it (how companies want to use it) and I really dislike writing UI automated tests.
Simply that I’ve made it to the end of 2024. It’s been an incredibly difficult year behind the scenes. I’ve not spoken about it publicly for obvious reasons.
But I’m so proud of how far we’ve come this year and I feel like there’s a strong foundation going into 2025.
We’ve had our head down taking action and creating change. I made a very high level list, in no particular order of what TeamMoT shipped and worked on this year.
Trends
TestBash back home to Brighton
double email list size
broke 100k followers on LinkedIn
Publish content daily
TWiT as a podcast
Slack came back! Controversially!
Continuous publishing / MoT as a YouTube type place
Memes
Memories
We rebranded, yay, it feels great.
Test Automation Cert
Software Testing Essentials Certification (STEC)
Community Badges
Community Certs
The Testing Planet
OnDemand courses, just one this year, but we have about 5 in the pipeline
30 Days of AI
404 talks
published great articles every week
MoT Profiles
OpenTo (work/mentor/teach/write/speak)
Radar
Figuring out how to change and evolve to a better MoT, it’s actually been really fun to apply a lot of my community thinking that I had spent so much time writing about (via Rosieland).
A lot of it has been an iterative, one change at a time, approach. It truly adds up!
Change requires deep, iterative and intentional action, and it’s messy. But it’s amazing when it works.
All the stress and anxiety I’ve had to carry.
Also, the economy? I hope 2025 welcomes more jobs for all those who are still looking.
Perfect question @alexandramot
Here is my response below
Celebrations: What wins are you most proud of?
Spotted Critical Bugs in Release phase for Production
Also got appreciation and received gifts from the Shiftsync Tricentis community for the webinar events
Challenges: What tested you the most (pun intended)?
Got an opportunity to test an application in Production after the final build spotted minor issues
Learnings: What lessons will you carry into 2025?
To more focus on latest tools and technologies to learn and build my career to another level by the help of MoT
Leave Behinds: What are you happy to leave in 2024?
Hopefully iam able to accept the myth 100% bug free product is not possible to build
For me the most important win was getting back to a physical TestBash conference for the first time in five years. I was quite anxious about how it would turn out, having not been very involved in the testing community so much over recent years and with the added challenge of having mobility issues. To be honest I’ve no idea why I should have been concerned as everyone was so wonderfully welcoming and friendly - Dome staff, fellow testers and the Ministry of Testing team!. So pleased it was back in Brighton as well, was really cool to be able to catch up with a number of previous testing folks I had worked with.
Next up has to be joining a This Week In Testing session back in October and deciding to join the on stage conversation. I was a bit apprehensive but I have to commend Simon for being such a warm and encouraging host. Public speaking isn’t something I feel all that confident with but it was such a nice experience.
And finally…from a work point of view one of my highlights was collaborating with a key developer on my team to deliver a critical performance improvement to our product. It was rather cool working together to prioritise the most important things to test, sharing the testing work between us and uncovering + resolving some really crucial bugs…
Challenges: What tested you the most (pun intended)?
From a personal point of view 2024 has been a difficult and emotional journey so that has to be the biggest challenge above all.
I was really pleased that I was able to get to TestBash and to join and be part of some really cool testing events - at least in the last 3 to 4 months of the year. Finding time and energy with a busy day job is always a challenge for me, especially finding that little extra time to make contributions to the testing community.
Learnings: What lessons will you carry into 2025?
That it’s important to look out for and take care of yourself.
In 2025 I’d like to look to adjust things so I can have some good quality time for learning new things about testing and automated tools.
That I’m not so bad at writing - I wrote my first blog in years back in September and I need to keep doing this and sharing my experiences.
Leave Behinds: What are you happy to leave in 2024?
One of the challenges of working with the same product for many years is that you become the central point of knowledge on lots of stuff, so I’d like to leave behind needing to be involved in so many things and use that time to share more of my knowledge.
Celebrations: Speaking a few conferences. Notably at Mabl Experience and winning their Quality Leader of the Year Award Challenges: Friggin Layoffs Learnings: That I didn’t have to be made of stone to achieve. I can be a thoughtful leader. Leave Behinds: The fallacy of my imposter syndrome.
Burnout due to company politics and some private topics combined. I haven’t worked in December.
I’m looking for a new employer. It’s not that easy anymore and it’s add up.
For me 2024 has been a roller-coaster ride throughout the year yet there have been some moments that I will cherish forever.
There are a few celebrations but one of them is being a part of MOT which made me realize the importance of online community and because of that I become part of some other wonderful communities including offline too.
So this year has been challenging because of handling two simultaneous automation tools playwright and Selenium at the same time with two different languages. Learning a new framework was also challenging but gave me new insight into how live project frameworks are being setup from scratch.
One of the key lessons I will carry from 2024 into 2025 is the advice, “Don’t Overdo AI, keep it limited,” shared by @parwalrahul in a recent meetup I attended. I completely agree with this thoughts.
Apart from that, I have also learned that being patient and showing patience is not only important but essential.
Throughout the year, I’ve explored numerous tools, technologies, and topics that will not only shape my 2025 but my entire career.
Another important lesson is the importance of networking and personal branding.
Avoiding Multi-Tasking is the be one thing wwon which I’m working currently and I will be happy to leave my “multitasking” habit in 2024 and focus on one task at a time in 2025.
Celebrations: What wins are you most proud of? Meeting Simon Tomes in person. Long time follower and fan of his work. One of the nicest people ever. If I we hadn’t mutually taken a risk it would not have happened. Forever grateful to MOT for that opportunity.
Challenges*: What tested you the most (pun intended)? Supporting my aunt with her end of life cancer treatment, whilst dealing with my own treatment, whilst trying to learn new skills and then looking for work - and not completely crumbling into nothing trying to support my family.
Learnings*: What lessons will you carry into 2025?
That not everyone cares about your neuro needs has the capacity to support your disabilities or even or can think about them - especially if they are dealing with their own needs. And that’s ok sometimes. That’s it ok to miss people that don’t respect you. Most of all that everyone carries trauma and that impacts their decisions and how they treat people.
Leave Behinds*: What are you happy to leave in 2024?
Linkedin aholes and comment drama kings
Felix Navidad to all and here’s looking forward to testing 2025!
2024 was probably the most challenging year so far, both professionally and personally. Three job changes, several months without any jobs, lots of personal ups and downs, health issues, etc…
But it’s kinda ending on a positive note since most of those are now resolved, or as the popular meme says “The horrors persist, but so do I!”.
Biggest challenge of 2024: Working two jobs for 4 full months. Both jobs were very demanding mentally (QA team lead and an odd mix of CPO/advisor position) and there were times I wasn’t sure I’d pull it off, but in the end everything worked out well enough.
Learnings: Huge improvement in my leadership and mentoring skills, as well as a nice boost in confidence. I realized that I was in the wrong places in 2023 and that made me doubt my skills and career choices, but luckily it was just a matter of some choices. As they say, “If the plant doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the plant.”.
Leave behinds: Stress and doubt. I can do anything, I just need to trust myself more and go with the flow. There is always a choice, and tomorrow is the new day.
Celebrations: Getting my life back on track once again. I do not know what 2025 will bring, but I’m ready for it.
Celebrations: 2024 was transformative for me! My biggest win was taking the leap to work full-time on Epic Test Quest after identifying a real need in our testing community. Getting EU funding validated our mission, but what really made my heart sing was the incredible response from testers everywhere. Speaking at events like TestBash, MoT Athens, and Vancouver helped me connect with so many passionate testers who shared their challenges and dreams. Every conversation reinforced that we’re building something truly needed.
Challenges: The biggest test was balancing between being a founder and staying connected to the testing community. When you’re building a tool for testers, you need to remain a tester at heart! Learning to wear multiple hats - speaker, interviewer, product owner, and most importantly, listener - while staying true to the testing mindset was quite the journey. Also, the responsibility of building something that will impact how people work can feel overwhelming at times!
Learnings: The power of community cannot be overstated! I learned that the best ideas come from really listening to testers’ daily challenges. Every interview, every meetup conversation taught me something new. I also learned that it’s okay to pivot and adjust plans based on feedback - being agile isn’t just for development teams!
Leave Behinds: I’m happy to leave behind the imposter syndrome moments of “Can I really do this?” and “Am I qualified enough to build this?” The support from the testing community has shown me that when you’re genuinely trying to solve a problem and listening to your users, you’re on the right path. Also leaving behind the fear of public speaking - after so many events this year, it’s become exciting rather than scary!
Looking forward to an amazing 2025 with this fantastic community!
Celebrations: 2024 was transformative for me! My biggest win was taking the leap to work full-time on Epic Test Quest after identifying a real need in our testing community. Getting EU funding validated our mission, but what really made my heart sing was the incredible response from testers everywhere. Speaking at events like TestBash, MoT Athens, and Vancouver helped me connect with so many passionate testers who shared their challenges and dreams. Every conversation reinforced that we’re building something truly needed.
Learnings: The power of community cannot be overstated! I learned that the best ideas come from really listening to testers’ daily challenges. Every interview, every meetup conversation taught me something new. I also learned that it’s okay to pivot and adjust plans based on feedback - being agile isn’t just for development teams!
Leave Behinds: I’m happy to leave behind the imposter syndrome moments of “Can I really do this?” and “Am I qualified enough to build this?” The support from the testing community has shown me that when you’re genuinely trying to solve a problem and listening to your users, you’re on the right path. Also leaving behind the fear of public speaking - after so many events this year, it’s become exciting rather than scary!