Life With Ministry of Testing: Content Doesn't Write Itself

"I'm all for the scissors. I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil." - Truman Capote



Today, I saw a tweet from the BossBoss, which led me to her post about life at Ministry of Testing. She encouraged others who are involved to jump in and write about life and what it involves.

Rosie and I met at the 2015 TestBash in New York. I was inspired by a number of speakers there and the fact that Rosie decided it was worth it to "jump the pond" and get TestBash started in the US.

I hadn't thought how much that one conference would influence where I'm at now in life, but I can say that I was definitely influenced. The TestBash community has been a home for me and my ideas ever since.

I joined twitter, and then later started a blog. At one point, on one of the slack channels Ministry of Testing has, Rosie called for writers and I was invited to the writer's channel where folks were talking about articles they were trying to publish and who might be able to review them.

It was Maaret's article that I read through first. I follow her blog already, so this article was like getting a more in-depth blog post. I remember making a ton of suggestions and noting when I agreed with a point, or gave my own experiences as validation for the points she made.

After I finished, I worried I had over done it. I should have stuck to the grammar and the spelling. The feedback was awesome actually. Maaret and Rosie loved it.

About the same time Rosie and I started conversations about being a staff writer and what kinds of articles she would like to see on a regular basis. I didn't see a problem with that, I was trying to write more technical articles and continue learning how to craft a message with that article that would be acceptable for the MoT audience.

Then, September 2016, I was laid off from my job. The company had been bought out, and the new company was pairing down staff. I was already in the interview process for another job when Rosie heard the news and offered me a part time position on the Ministry of Testing staff editing content submissions.

I've been working with Rosie ever since, helping testers find their voice on the page, working to hone the message they want to deliver, and polish it with the right context and tone.

It's some of the most fulfilling work I've ever done. I've watched other writers bloom as they work through their first piece and then write their next one, improving each time. I've even been professionally jealous of one or two as I review their articles, wondering how they write their thoughts and put them so perfectly into words.

It's been five months since I started this journey and I don't regret it. There are times I've wondered if I bit off more than I can chew, but the writers, other MoT staff, and the community keep encouraging me nearly every day. I can't wait to see how the rest of the year will shape up and what content we publish next. Speaking of which, I have to get back to editing.



Comments

Post a Comment

Most Read Posts

Ready, Tester One? *GO!*

"I handed my passport to the immigration officer, and he looked at it and looked at me and said, 'What are you?'" - Grace Hopper (60 Minutes Interview) The Grace Hopper quote above always makes me think about my job as a tester. Companies that develop software know they need testers, but they generally have hard time figuring out what testers are and what skills they need in the role. There have many discussions about how testers can be more technical and at some point, coding comes up in the conversation. My response on twitter contained a few things on a list I have, which I created for a client, so they could have a checklist of skills. This checklist was a guideline to determine the skill level of the tester applicant. This is by no means a complete list and I would be open to additions to the list. Feel free to add those to the comments or tweet them to me. For clarity, I took the list of skills I had and broke them into levels. I like games and I lik...
Read more

Learning From Failure: The Tricky iOS Environment

"You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don't try to forget the mistakes, but you don't dwell on it. You don't let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space."  - Johnny Cash There are times when our work, as a team, as testers on a team can give us insight into how we can improve things for the overall success of the product. Often those things are issues or defects which can present themselves at the most inconvenient times, in the most inconsistent ways. When we can learn from them and improve things for everyone on the team, the team benefits. When the team owns the defects and the testing strategy, not only the testers, then customers benefit as well. I was working remotely verifying a release and only had simulators and emulators to work with as I was testing mobile builds. Often folks mistrust builds which only use emulated software and not real devices for fairly good reasons...
Read more

Postman In The Pipeline: Newman Delivers

Image
  It's not me, it's the songs.  I'm just the postman,  I deliver the songs....  - Bob Dylan Recently, I've had the chance to work on a project with some other awesome folks which has involved creating a BFF - A back end for front end service. This allows the app to access several API and aggregate calls into something the app can use, or lets the app send information to the BFF for several APIs to receive. Part of the code coverage for the BFF was creating some simple tests with Postman around the business logic and interactions. Learning About Postman I did lots of reading. Lots of reading how others has done things (Danny Danton - big props for being a super help!). Eventually, I came down to a small set of tests which could give us some accuracy about our BFF pipeline and the APIs we were accessing with it. Postman has a couple of options for this, global variables, environmental variables, and plain variables. One of the first problems I came acros...
Read more