So last month saw the London Perl Workshop take place. Several talks related to testing, and plenty of interest in CPAN Testers. Mark Keating and crew were videoing many of the talks. Sadly the microphone position meant the volume is quite low in places, but they are still worth watching. You can see testing talks from myself (slides), DrForr, and additionally my lightning talk (slides). If you missed the event, there are plenty of great talks you can now catch on the Shadowcat channel.

Also during last month there have been several fixes to the Reports Builder. Also following some conversations at LPW, I came away with a few ideas to improve the performance of the Feed and Builder components so that we can get almost real time production of reports. Over the coming months and likely during the 2015 QA Hackathon, I aim to work more on this and hopoefully have a solution working around the hackathon. Karen Etheridge also help to spot a fault with the Admin site, in that if a tester hasn't allocated a contact email address, any report that has been flagged isn't allocated to them, but to the Admin user. It does mean there is a bit of extra work for me at the moment, but ultimately I need to rework the way testers are notified, particularly in the event of the system using an old email address. If you've flagged any reports and haven't seen them removed as yet, please give me a nudge and I'll approve their removal.

One person I would to single out for making a great effort to promote testing in general, is Sinan Unur, who has been writing some great blog posts. TDD is all well and good, but who's testing the tests?, You've gotta quotemeta! and Tests should not fail due to EOL differences across platforms to mention a few. He has some great in depth Perl posts, and all are well worth reading.

A colleague of mine, Matt Wheatley, recently had a blog post published about how he works in development. Except the post isn't so much about how he works, but more about the value of a QA Department. Our QA team is awesome, and we perhaps rely on them a bit too much sometimes, but I imagine there are many awesome QA teams out there, and this is just one tribute to them all. I especially liked the reference to Bill Sempf's tweat.

We had another Metabase overflow last month, which means we've filled another bucket in AWS. David Golden has created a new one, but it does mean we need to think about moving to our newer architechure sooner rather than later. David, Neil Bowers and I have been in discussions recently, and I hope we will get some movement towards this in the coming year. There will be a lot of changes needed, both to code and routing, so it won't be a simple change. However, it will be a change that will help us grow more productively in the future.

More new coming next month. And my New Year's Resolution is to get these summaries out a bit more on time!