This is a guest posting by Simon Knight. Simon Knight works with teams of all shapes and sizes as a test lead, manager & facilitator, helping to deliver great software by building quality into every stage of the development process.
If you’ve worked with testers or programmers, or are one yourself, you’ll likely have noticed that they spend a lot of time with their headphones on. I’m a tester and I have my headphones on right now!
I’ll often listen to something to help me concentrate on my work. Music helps me to block out external distractions and focus. If someone questions whether listening to music improves performance and productivity, I point them towards this article.
I like to mix up what I am listening to sometimes, and learn something new, either while I’m working, or when I’m commuting or exercising. Podcasts are an excellent way of doing this, and there are some great testing podcasts to choose from. To save you the effort of going hunting for them, I’ve listed my favorites below:
Ministry of Testing
The Ministry of Testing is has an awesome software testing community, and you can expect to see that vibe reflected in the podcast. Listening to this podcast is a complete no-brainer, it is hosted by a range of personalities, and covers a huge range of expertise in the industry. There’s even a bit of overlap with Dan Ashby and Stephen Janaway’s Testing in the Pub podcast.
Listen to this podcast if you love hearing the human stories behind testing, as well as opinions on how to do it better, faster and more economically.
Perfbytes
Mark Tomlinson is a name that often appears in the world of software testing podcasts. For the most part, he’s the creative mind behind the PerfBytes and News of the Dammed series, along with James Pulley and occasional guests. If you’re relatively new to performance testing, I recommend dipping into the archives and listening to Mark and James et-al., taking a deep dive into the fundamentals of what performance testing is, and how to approach it like a pro.
Listen to this podcast if you’re interested in learning more about, or just want to keep up with, trends in performance testing and engineering.
Test Talks
Having been around since 2014, Joe Colantonio has built up an enviable backlog of testing goodness with his Test Talks podcast. His podcast covers a lot of ground, with a strong bias towards automation and continuous delivery. As such, it’s an ideal choice to have in your podcast queue; even if it’s just to build up an awareness of what tools and strategies are out there, without necessarily needing to take a deep dive into any subject.
Listen to this podcast if you’re passionate about test automation.
AB Testing
Alan Page and Brent Jensen get their rant on about all things testing. Think your role is about providing information? Think again! In the brave new world of continuous delivery and production telemetry, your role as a tester is to measure, analyse and help steer product evolution with actionable insights. Data driven decision making is where it’s at, and if you can’t shape up, it’s time to ship out!
Listen to this podcast if you’re angry about the testing status quo.
Join 34,000 subscribers and receive carefully researched and popular article on software testing and QA. Top resources on becoming a better tester, learning new tools and building a team.
Quality Remarks
New kid on the testing podcast block, Keith Klain, hits the magic number, at least at the time of writing this article, with a series of software testing luminary interviews. Keith brings a huge amount of testing and change enabling experience to the table, having been a long-time “C-Level Whisperer” (coined by Damian Synadinos), in various enterprise organisations, and he’s not afraid to share it. He also does a fine job of extracting experiences, insights and philosophies from his guests. I can’t wait to hear more!
Listen to this podcast if you’re context driven, not Context Driven.
Tune in
I hope you’ve added all of those to a playlist in your preferred podcast app. As you listen to them, one of the things that you’ll probably find ties them all together, is the idea that testing is a story, it has a narrative arc. For each person, team and organisation, the testing story is completely different – being an emergent property of the people, product, tools, architecture, and organisational culture in which it’s carried out.
As such, it makes a fascinating listening experience on every one of these podcasts, at least to me. I hope it does for you too!
Did I miss out your favorite testing podcast? Let us know in the comments area below.
