At 10:00 am on Saturday 14 November 2026, an application appears on screens around Malaysia that none of the people looking at it has seen before. Nobody knows what it does well or where it breaks. The testers in front of it have until 1:00 pm to find out, write it up and make the case for every defect they report.
That is the Malaysia Testing Cup, a free, three-hour online competition run by the Malaysian Software Testing Board (MSTB). It is the Pre-Qualifier to the World’s Best Tester Competition: the ten highest-ranked go on to represent Malaysia at the World’s Best Tester (WBT) final on Wednesday 2 December 2026. Registration opened on Thursday 8 October and closes at 11:59 pm on Friday 30 October.
What the Cup asks of a tester
The format is simple to describe and hard to do well. An unknown application is revealed at 10:00 am, and from that moment the clock shapes every decision. Three hours is not long enough to learn an unfamiliar product thoroughly. A tester has to explore, build a working picture of the system quickly, decide where the risk lies, and spend the time there.
That makes it a different test from the long projects most testers know. Exploration matters, but so does judgement: which areas to probe first, when a lead is worth following, and when to stop and write up what has been found. Under pressure, the temptation is to log everything. The Cup rewards the opposite instinct. Quality beats quantity: a few excellent, reproducible reports are worth more than many thin ones.
AI tools are allowed, but they are not a shortcut. The judges look at how well a tester uses them, and smart use earns a bonus of its own. A tester who lets a tool produce a pile of vague findings gains little; one who uses it to sharpen an analysis or tighten a report is doing what the competition wants to see.
How it is judged
Every entry is judged by people, not by a script, and the judges come from World’s Best Tester. They score against a sheet with a maximum of 130 points.
Six core criteria carry 20 points each: the quality of the test plan; test analysis and design; test implementation; test execution and bug reporting; the summary test report; and non-functional testing, such as performance and usability. Two bonuses of 5 points each sit on top, one for smart use of AI tools and one for exceptional performance.
Read that list again and the shape of the competition becomes clear. Finding bugs is one line out of six. The rest asks whether a tester planned the work, designed tests with intent, ran them with discipline and reported the results in a form someone else could act on. It is the whole testing process, compressed into three hours.
A few rules keep the scoring honest. Enhancement requests, feature suggestions and nice-to-have improvements are not defects, however good the idea behind them. Competitors are expected to apply ISTQB® terminology, the shared vocabulary of the profession, in every testing activity they carry out. The system under test is chosen by World’s Best Tester and kept secret until it is revealed, so nobody arrives with an advantage. All judging outcomes are final.
Campus, national, world
The Malaysia Testing Cup is new, but it does not start from nothing. Since 2014, MSTB has run the Test Design Competition (TDC) for university teams of one lecturer and four to five undergraduates. Each team works through a three-month challenge on campus and presents its work to industry judges, with the prize-giving at SOFTECAsia in September.
TDC and the Cup test the same discipline on two time-scales. Both use ISTQB® vocabulary and similar judging. TDC asks for depth: strategy, design and the ability to defend your work over months. The Cup asks for speed: what you can find, and how well you can report it, in a single morning. World’s Best Tester then puts the best of them against leading testers from around the world.
Seen together, the three steps form one testing season: campus, then national, then world. TDC teaches you to test properly; the Malaysia Testing Cup proves you can do it against the clock; World’s Best Tester puts you against the world. Depth, then speed.
The season is open at more than one point in a career. Practitioners in industry now have a national round of World’s Best Tester close to home, free and online. TDC students who have done the marathon can try the sprint, and a TDC team can split into two or three pairs to enter. TDC lecturers can enter a pair of their own or coach their students’ pairs. And twelve years of TDC means many alumni are now working testers; the Cup gives them a reason to come back and show what they have learned since. No TDC history is needed to take part.
Who can enter and how
The Cup is open to all Malaysians, and to foreigners currently studying or working in Malaysia. On the registration form, entrants choose a category: student, lecturer or working professional. Entry is free.
Teams have one or two members; a solo entrant is simply a team of one. Each person registers individually, and teammates type the same team name so their entries are linked. Nobody may be in two teams.
The competition runs online, so you can join from anywhere. Bring your own equipment and internet connection. Login credentials arrive by email before competition day. Cameras stay on and visible throughout, and the official language is English.
The key dates:
- Thursday 8 October 2026: registration opened
- Friday 30 October 2026, 11:59 pm: registration closes
- Thursday 5 November 2026: last day to withdraw
- Saturday 14 November 2026: competition day, with the briefing and connection check at 9:30 am, testing 10:00 am–1:00 pm, judging 1:00–6:00 pm and results at 6:00 pm
- Wednesday 2 December 2026: the World’s Best Tester final, for the top 10
What you take away
Everyone who takes part receives a Certificate of Participation and a digital badge. The top three are recognised and entered into the Malaysia Testing Cup Hall of Fame. The ten highest-ranked represent Malaysia at World’s Best Tester on Wednesday 2 December 2026, so anyone entering should be ready to commit to that date.
When the clock stops at 1:00 pm, what remains on the page is the plan, the reports and the reasoning behind them. That is a fair measure of what a tester knows, and for ten of them it is also the way onto the world stage.
Register for the Malaysia Testing Cup, free, at mstb.org/testing-cup. Enquiries go to MSTB’s Testing Cup secretariat: laily@mstb.org or azura@mstb.org.