How do I stay "up to date" on software testing related stuff?

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"Up to date" can probably be debated as development in our field change quite fast, and what was ground braking yesterday, fast becomes old news today.

I try to read as much as possible, and this usually vary from week to week, day to day due to other obligations, but I squeeze in some hours each week. This is mostly done on the evening, on the way to and back from work, and at work when I have 5-10 minutes until a meeting starts, and I can not start on anything new, I spend that time picking up a blog post or two, and traversing through it.

There is a set of blogs I follow, these are mostly from other practitioners in the field software testing / development. All of them are organized in different folders in Feedly, which I use to aggregate the blog posts, news, and other information.



Here is a screenshot of the structure that I have. Testing folder contain most feeds from about 50-ish sources, and I have separated some of the blogs into AutTesting (Automated Testing) as these tend to be more technical, thus I need to spent some more time to read and look into the code. Here are the blogs I follow in the Testing and AutTest folder:


In addition to pure testing blogs, I also follow some blogs from tech companies to learn more about how they do stuff, not necessarily only how they do testing, but also development, architecture, experiments they conduct, how they work, organize them selves, etc. All of these can have a direct or indirect impact on testing. Companies like Netflix, Spotify, Facebook, Google, are of course on that list. Lastly, general technology, business and leadership blogs and feeds, are categorized into own folders, as there are a lot to learn from these, like what is happening in the tech/business world and some soft skills on the leadership part.

Twitter is also well used, though I do not write that much, I mostly follow interesting discussions, and also pick up stuff from the ones that I follow, when they tweet/re-tweet. A lot of interesting stuff is also published from conferences, both live, as the conference unfold, and after it has ended. My twitter handle is @meeleetester, you can check out who I am following here: 

Most of the people I follow are in the software industry, so one could categorize this as the "my-twitter-software-testing" community, which brings us to communities. When it comes to online communities I mostly follow TestHuddle and Ministry of Testing, and have been following both for years. Live or in-person, there are different companies that often arrange breakfast seminars here in, and around Oslo, Norway, which I try to get to once in a while, and we also have a Test Forum Meet-up group which I together with others am co-organizing, where testers from around Oslo meet once a month to catch a presentation from a peer, and discuss various test related topics.

When possible, both time wise and financially, I attend conferences both domestic and abroad - unfortunately not as much as I would like to, but luckily there are a lot of conferences that either stream live, or publish the videos of the presentations after the conference has ended, so most of them are available on YouTube or other sources. Usually if someone has tweeted about a good talk, I try to search it up either to watch it or find the slides, and go through these. Selenium Conferences, Atlassian Tech conferences, and GTAC (Google Test Automation Conference) are just some examples of these.

On the subject of online presentations and videos, from time to time I also try to catch a live webinar or two, but lately I found these to be very sales oriented, always a catchy title and description and when you set aside an hour to watch it, usually one is disappointed due to it being 90% sales pitches and rarely what I expected. So what I do is unless I know the speaker from previous talks and his/her areas of expertise, I avoid the live webinars, and rather prefer the recorded webinars. Since then I can easily fast forward and jump over the sales material and see whether there are something to learn from this.

Previously there were quite a lot of magazines which one could follow but as the years go by, more and more of these stop publishing and I only have a handful on my notification list. When a new issue is published, I quickly browse through it and if there are any interesting articles I read them.

In addition to these daily/weekly time spent on the mentioned sources of information, I also try to read a book or two within the field of development, software testing, leadership or psychology, each 2-3 months. There are quite a few books on these subjects, I usually pick up the ones that are most relevant for me at the moment. I'll list some of them below, if someone is interested in picking up a title or two.

Due to nature of my previous and current roles at work I also get involved in looking into, investigating and learning more about tools. We look into which tools that could/should be used for different parts of the development/testing cycle. This also involves a lot of discussion and interaction with different teams, why and how they do stuff within the team, their needs, and issues that they are looking into solving. Last but not least on the list are my peers and colleagues whom I learn a lot from. This could be someone on my or another team who have tried out something new, or currently is experimenting on or trying out something new. This usually tickles my curiosity and I end up looking more into that, whether it is a process, tool or something else.

So this is more or less how I try to stay "up to date"...

Comments

  1. Anssi Lehtelä28 January 2018 at 07:48

    Impressive list! I think these days I mostly go by Twitter, picking up the stuff I read from there.

    One comment and one question:

    Comment: On the conferences list, I would add the magnificent http://europeantestingconference.eu/

    Question: Do you still get to do hands any on testing in your role?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mili28 January 2018 at 08:59

    Thanks for the comment Anssi. I will definitely add the conference to the list.

    On the hands-on testing question, I do get to do that but unfortunately not every day, but I've recently joined a team/project where I will be doing much more of that, as well as helping out on the test automation effort.

    ReplyDelete
  3. sathya23 July 2020 at 18:42

    I must thank you for the efforts you have put in penning this site. I am hoping to check out the same high-grade content by you later on as well. Keep up the good work

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