At Essential meetups it’s important to use that we teach is relevant and useful. We carefully select and discuss each of our sessions to ensure that participants leave feeling they have taken a step forward to becoming and even more awesome tester.
However, we work in a big industry and the work of a Tester is wide and varied. So to ensure that we are still reaching our goals of being relevant and useful we want to know what you want to learn. Are you interested in learning more about bug reports? Test strategy? or working with Developers? Then let us know on this thread.
We promise that all feedback will be taken into consideration and will inform what, when and how we teach students about software testing.
It’s a broad landscape and there are many frameworks for both application and testing.
Javascript continues to gain prominence and being able to test with it is essential for a modern UI tester
Might be good to cover some of the basics from the viewpoint of a tester.
Foremost - thanks for asking, that is an incredibly generous question!
Here’s a broad gauntlet of things that hold my interest or that I hear from my peers as things of interest (I realize some may not be entirely applicable, it’s still good for idea generation):
Disclaimer note regarding ‘best practices/etiquette’ type terms. I realize that there may not be any, or none subscribed to by the entire industry, etc Feel free to substitute with ‘Best Tips’.
Performance Testing (What is it, How to begin? What to do?)
Selenium (What is it? How to use it? Automation Testing & You!)
How to create better test plans! (An aside: Testrail: Do you use it? If so, what does your setup look like and why?)
Test Runs
Best etiquette in writing a Test Plan & Sharing that with Clients
Test Strategies - and why you would implement specific strategies (there are beginners!)
QA / Dev Relationships
Best Practices
Processes (Typical vs. Non Typical)
SLDC and how understanding this improves testing (Does it?! >.> )
How to produce a good bug report/best practices.
Regression - How tos
Types of testing (B/W Box, Manual, Regression, Load, Performance, etc.) and when to do each/everyone’s favorite inputs/tips.
What code should a Tester know?
Thanks again for the question and I hope you have a great day!
I’m rather late to the party, but I’d be very interested in a session about testing advocacy. In particular, it’s challenging to sell developer testing enough that it’s adopted, and it’s hard to convince people that testing isn’t just about checking/validation. Hearing recommendations and discussing how other people have handled similar challenges would be really useful.
You’ve hit the nail on the head with that suggestion. We’re definitely looking at how we can add more in about selling testing to others into our sessions. Hopefully, we will have some results soon.
@savage gave plenty of great topics to deal with. Personally I’d love to learn more about the formal aspect of the testing Jobs.
To give you a bit more of context I’ve been an operator and I was involved in manual testing during daytime for over 3 years. The company I worked for then already had dedicated testers but because of the configuration and rules our team was involved in the process. So I performed manual tests but never really did the formal job. The way I reported things and results was on JIRA, escalating or email which to me does not ressemble a proper Test report. The Testers just did retrieve that results and reported accordingly. Today I’m trying to get myself in testing Full time. To me the writing the tests or doing acceptance is the most attractive part but that wasn’t directly my job. So this is the aspect of the Job I’d be the most interested in right now.
Regards,
Seconding Alison’s post about testing advocacy; it’s not only about selling testing to developers, there’s also a job to be done about upward selling to other managers - peer managers at an equivalent level in an organisation and more senior managers upstream in the corporate hierarchy. It was a big problem in my last role and some ideas about how to sell upwards or even just promote testing would be good.
