Today I’m talking to Rosie Sherry. She runs Ministry of Testing, a thriving community for software testers.
Software testers are people who test software application and websites. They test the user experience and check that all features are working properly and that there aren’t any foreseeing risks or vulnerabilities. Testing is an extremely important piece of the puzzle when you build a product.
Rosie has built up this membership community with free and private areas, courses, and organizes a lot of conferences. We talk about what is testing, what’s involved, and how she’s been able to build a thriving community over the past several years.
Enjoy!
Episode Notes
[3:12] What is Ministry of Testing. Being a professional software tester.
- “Creating content is really hard work, and creating good content is even harder.”
[10:52] The importance of running tests professionally. Common traits of successful testers.
- “If I have to roughly split testing methods, I’d split it into the Old World and New World, non-Agile or Agile.”
- “Testers are probably one of the only people in a business talking to everybody else, because they want to understand the product as much as possible.”
- “Testing is more than finding bugs. It’s looking for risks and how can people understand the risks.”
[21:09] How Rosie got into testing and got into creating a community after having two kids.
[27:29] Attracting the first members and bringing the community to over 20k participants. The importance of the “human connection”.
- “What the software testing world suffers a lot from is being… so corporate.”
- “One of the reasons I started the conference, is because all the conferences out there, the speakers are sold to vendors.”
[36:20] Team, milestones, and revenue through 3 channels. How a guy from the community became the CEO.
- “Most of the people we hired came through the community. That shows the real passion for what we do.”
Links
- Rosie Sherry on Twitter
- Rosie Sherry’s company-community, Ministry of Testing
- Atlassian
- Seth Godin
- Ning
- Discourse
