I’ve recently had the pleasure of acting as guest editor for Testing Trapeze magazine and thought it would be worth briefly writing about this experience.
If you’re not familiar with this magazine, it started in February 2014 and is published online bi-monthly. It is normally edited by well-known and respected member of the context-driven testing community, Katrina Clokie, from New Zealand. From the magazine’s website “About”:
We want to see a small, simple, quality magazine that amplifies the voices of testers from Australia and New Zealand, presenting a clear, consistent message of good testing practice from existing and emerging leaders. We want to demonstrate the caliber of our community and encourage new testers to join us by engaging in their work at a different level. We want to create a publication that we feel proud of, that truly represents Australia and New Zealand on the international stage; a magazine that you want to read, share and contribute to.
Over the last two and a half years, the magazine has consistently provided a high quality experience for its readers by focusing on a relatively small number of articles per issue and wrapping them up in a beautifully presented publication. Each edition typically comprises of four articles from local (i.e. Australia and New Zealand) authors plus another from an international author. There is no set theme per edition and new writers are actively encouraged, so the sixteen editions to date have given lots of opportunity to new voices from the testing community particularly across Australia and New Zealand.
The main tasks for the editor are logistical and organizational in nature – communicating with authors to get their articles in for review, organizing reviewers for each article, finalizing the content, ordering the articles in the magazine, and writing the editorial. The ease or difficulty of the job is largely dictated by the other people involved and, in my brief experience, everyone was on the same page (no pun intended) in terms of getting good content ready in time to publish to our deadline. Luckily for me, Katrina wrote a blog post Behind the Scenes: Editor of Testing Trapeze in 2015 which helped me work out the various tasks I needed to check off along the way.
It was interesting to see the draft articles coming in from the various authors and the different amounts of review feedback that needed to be incorporated to get to “final” versions for the magazine. Thanks to the reviewers for doing such timely and diligent jobs in providing constructive feedback which was taken on board by the authors.
The magazine is free to download (as a PDF) from the Testing Trapeze website; I strongly encourage you to become a regular reader and also consider expressing an interest in writing an article – you will be warmly welcomed and provided with practical and helpful feedback from the reviewers, there’s nothing to be afraid of!
Thanks again to Katrina for the opportunity to briefly edit the magazine, to Adam for the amazing work with layout and the website, and to all of the authors and reviewers without whom we’d have no content to share. I hope you enjoy the edition I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to bring together.
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