Fiona Nic Dhonnacha

Since 1993, we’ve been bringing testers together at Europe’s largest software testing conference. That’s 29 years of expert talks and sessions, sharing new ideas, and forming thousands of friendships. This year, we’re amping up the experience with a truly global online programme: 50+ diverse, educational sessions; 53 superstar speakers from 14 different countries, and a global community of testers. It’s all here, and there’s SO much of it happening. So, we’ve narrowed it down to 10 things you can’t miss at EuroSTAR 2021. Get your ticket now and join us next week – Sep 28-30th.

Meet the people who have the deep technical knowledge you’re seeking. Discuss the topics that matter the most to you. Leap into action with real learnings you can apply both professionally and personally. Make lifelong friends with people who share the same passions.

1. Aha! moments at inspiring keynotes

The EuroSTAR Conference always draws the biggest names in testing, ready to share their experiences with you – successes, failures, & breakthroughs, and you don’t want to miss the amazing lightbulb moments our keynotes are sparking this year. Michiel Boreel shares his insights on digital happiness and the impact of AI on machines. Janet Gregory dives into ways you can engage with your testing activities and accelerate your learning. Maaret Pyhäjärvi highlights the importance of agency and how to foster that in an organization. Rob Lambert talks about 10  useful techniques you can use to move people into motion and enact change, and Aprajita Mathur shares her journey of testing bioinformatics applications.

2. The actionable tutorials

EuroSTAR tutorials are in-depth training sessions with our expert trainers, and it’s where you learn those practical new skills that you just can’t wait to put into practice in your work.  We have a whopping 14 half-day interactive tutorials this year, hosted by a star line-up of speakers including Rik Marselis, Dawn Haynes, Michael Bolton, Jana Gierloff, Tariq King, Mette Bruhn-Pederson, and lots more. Topics include (deep breath) agile, BDD, automation, collaboration, QA, continuous delivery, security, AI, testing teams, gamification, risk… whatever you’re working with, we’ve got you covered. Bring your questions, problems, curiosity & a fresh notebook. Check out our full line up of tutorials here.

3. Fresh insights at track talks

Track talks are 30 mins long – bite-sized learning opportunities that pack a punch. We have 30 track talks at EuroSTAR this year, brought to you by Isabel Evans, Tina Christin Syversen, Erik Fogg, Veerle Verhagen, Peter Collewijn, and lots more incredible speakers. Whatever your topic of interest or expertise, there’s plenty of knowledge and insights for you to build on. Here’s just a few examples of what you will take away from track talks.

• why testing must be done as a whole team approach
• how to build sustainable continuous performance pipelines in large-scale enterprises
• use the VOICE model to understand your objectives and why you are testing
• understand why testing AI systems is different to testing traditional rule based systems
• how to authorise API requests correctly – and test it
• learn a complete ‘CSI’ algorithm to deal with the most difficult test cases

5. The thrill of lightning strikes

The concept of Lightning Strikes is to challenge speakers to give an engaging talk in just 5 minutes… 8 speakers each have 5 minutes and just two slides to give a complete presentation on their chosen topic. If they don’t finish on time, lightning will strike and they have to (virtually) leave the stage immediately! This year’s topic is experimentation. Who will convey their points clearly and quickly? Who will be unceremoniously struck down? Join us to find out.

6. The impromptu conversations

We all know that conversations spill outside of the speaker sessions, and that’s usually where new ideas are born, discussions and opinions are shared and debated. At EuroSTAR 2021, you can meet and jump into conversations with the world’s largest testing community This is is an opportunity to connect and meet people from very different backgrounds and experiences. There are always groups of people gathering to discuss different methodologies and their merits: agile, devops, and anything else you want to talk about. What conversations will you join?

8 Solving problems at the Test Clinic

The Test Clinic helps you solve your software testing problems, with the help of Our ‘Test Doctors’ – industry experts with years of testing experience and knowledge. They’re on hand to offer coaching and guidance on ideas and solutions. Every year the Test Doctors strive to solve 100% of problems, and won’t send you home until you have a solution to implement on your return! Is there something slowing your team down? Do you have an  idea that could help others improve? Bring it to the Test Clinic. You can take part in open clinics or avail of 1:1 appointments.

9. Asking your burning questions

If you’ve ever been dying to ask a speaker a question, but didn’t get around to it during their talk or Q&A, the Ask me Anything sessions are just what you’re looking for. It’s pretty simple – it’s a dedicated session to give you a chance to ask a speaker your burning questions. We have Ask Me Anything sessions with some of the best minds in testing. This is your chance to chat to some of our speakers including Gaspar Nagy on BDD, Irja Straus on collaborating with stakeholders, Sune Engsig on automation, Ken Munro on security, and more.

Now you know of 10 things you can’t miss at EuroSTAR 2021 – what next? There’s so much more going on, and the only thing left to do is get your ticket right now, and make sure you don’t miss out ! Join us next week, Sep 28-30th.

Part 2: making the change

In the first part of this article series I introduced the five principles we use to guide our service delivery philosophy. I spoke about overcoming the initial challenges to changes in the workplace, and how the principles became even more important in light of the social and business upheaval brought about by the Covid pandemic.

But understanding the principles is one thing. Making them work is a whole different ballgame. 

Making the change

It takes more than changing how we work to make the change to the ‘new normal’ a seamless and successful one. Within the company – and within myself – we needed to make a mental change to what this all entailed.

For example, we needed to shift from expecting people to be online from 8AM to 5PM, and from judging productivity based on time spent online as opposed to actual outcomes delivered. It also meant a change in understanding deliverables, and discovering if people were actually able to deliver what was expected of them.

A good first step in this approach is to make it clear, from a leadership perspective, what’s expected of each individual and team. This flows on to the responsibility, visibility and collaboration from a team and a management perspective. Once this was agreed, we no longer had to look at whether someone was online at specific hours and focusing on the ‘’green bots’ of availability, and instead focused on the outcomes, and correlated that with productivity.

The key to making the change, as I personally discovered, is empathy. Not in the usual sense, but rather empathy for how people like to work in their own space (and at their own pace), how they can be fatigued by staring at faces on a screen all day, and how they have their own schedules and rhythms for running errands and running their households. Working from home is not working at work, and the more we try to force that square peg into round holes, the less successful we’ll be in transitioning our workplaces in the new normal.

Outcomes-based delivery

From a management perspective, we took on the notion of outcomes-based delivery as opposed to hours-based productivity. It became less important for our staff to be online, and more important that they were still delivering to expectations.

Obviously, there are times when someone has to be online – like a team meeting or a client call. But outside of those times, people were freed up to work as they needed, when they needed. This necessarily meant making a change to how we measured productivity. Fortunately most of our clients use Agile, and are Agile in their workflows, which means we can use constructs like velocity tracking to measure whether a team’s velocity is dropping or improving. If it’s dropping we can start asking questions or take a closer look at any issues affecting productivity in those teams. Moreover, team stand-ups become more important, so that people are aware of the goals and collaborate and create visibility accordingly, which then ropes in the principles of responsibility and prioritisation.

Finding balance

While maintaining productivity is key to service delivery, we also needed to make sure that our people were supported through the changes it required to balance productivity with wellbeing. We were very careful to look for signs of mental fatigue brought about by the trauma of the pandemic on the one hand, and the sudden drop in sick days taken, and increase in availability on the other, because this generally came at the cost of work life balance.

Every individual is different. From personal experience, it’s easy for me to walk into my study at seven in the morning and then have to pull myself away from the screen at seven in the evening. When there’s no commute and few distractions, work can take on an all-encompassing persona.

For many people it takes just as much discipline to prioritise taking time away from work – going for walk or to the gym – as it does to keep working. From a management perspective it’s equally important not to expect the sudden jump in productivity to be the ‘new normal’, mainly because it’s realistically unsustainable. Trust me when I tell you there’s no harder stop to productivity than burnout.

Closing thoughts 

From a business perspective, service delivery has always been about ensuring our clients are always getting the value they expect and deserve from us. We’ve done it by applying our core principles in a way that allowed us to make the change to a new way of working without taking our eye off our delivery goals.

Once you have the metrics in place and can measure performance based on KPIs – for example, mixing in service delivery scorecards and net promoter scores with a focus on internal KPIs – then you can adjust to whatever the ‘new normal’ means for your business in terms of service delivery.

Want to learn more about delivery models? Join Inspired Testing’s Mihai Grigorescu at EuroSTAR Conference on 11:15 CEST Thursday, 30 September for an in-depth exploration of the lessons learned in the journey towards a ‘Quality engineering without frontiers’ delivery model, tearing down the typical limitations imposed by the unprecedented  pressures of a post 2020, modern, interconnected world.

We’ve got a packed programme of 50+ talks at EuroSTAR 2021, brought to you by world renowned speakers, to inspire your testing and generate new ideas for your work. Book your ticket now.

Author

Leon Lodewyks, Chief Delivery Officer at Inspired Testing.

Want to become a better speaker? Create that perfect presentation to blow your audience away? We’ve got you covered. Learn to speak like a pro from the people who do it best – our own EuroSTAR 2021 expert speakers, who are ready to wow our attendees this September. They’ve got lots of tips you can use to make your next presentation sing, and have you speaking like a true pro in no time – and who knows, we might see you on the EuroSTAR stage in the near future…

Check out the best ways to present your information, how to achieve the ideal set-up, how and when to be ruthless when cutting out information, making the most of online presentations, and lots more.

Keep it short, keep it focused. I know that all your ideas are totally brilliant, but you really do only have 20 minutes to get one idea across and embedded into your audience’s minds. With a typically tight schedule and an abundance of interesting information, you will need to be tactical about this.

Try this: Put each point you have onto a separate, rough slide, then practise talking through each slide. You will run over the 20 minutes. Now, think about your one central message, that one idea you need inside people’s minds at the end. Ask yourself – is the point on this slide absolutely necessary to that message? If not, ruthlessly cut that slide out. Also, cut it out, don’t trim it down, hoping that you can briefly cover this plus a myriad of other points. You most likely can’t.

If you think it’s tough to get your idea across in only 20 minutes, have a look at a few of the totally brilliant TED talks for inspiration; none of which are longer than this time.

Presenting in general: Your presentation is a distillation of what you know. Remember you have a story to tell, which needs to be gripping. But to tell that story – to make the distillation – you need to know the back-story. In other words, you have more material in your mind and your notes than you will present, because you won’t have time. Having that background will help you tell your story. Writing a paper can give you the chance to expand on your ideas. Think how J. K. Rowling built up a whole world: her notebooks have details that didn’t make it into the books, and the books have details that didn’t get to the films.

For speaking on Zoom: Take a few minutes to do your set up, as people are going to have to look at you and your backdrop for the duration of the talk. Check your camera angle, background, and appearance before you start – for example for a Zoom meeting, you can check your set-up before the meeting by having a Zoom meeting by yourself to see what you look and sound like. Use a plain background, and ensure there’s nothing that shouldn’t be visible in the broadcast. Raise your laptop/device up so it’s level with your face (I put my laptop on a shoebox) – then you won’t be filming the inside of your nose. Lighting from the side and front, not from the back, gives a good light to your face.

Many speakers are much better in Q&A than presenting the topic from prepared slides, so turn this to your benefit: imagine your talk is a Q&A and think about what questions your audience would ask. Structure your talk in a way you would answer these assumed questions. You can even show or say out loud the question you are going to address as a kind of section intro. This way you can ensure that your talk will be more relevant. When you record/present the talk, imagine a person behind the camera as one who was asking the questions – it will appear more natural both for you, and your audience.

Keep it simple: Don’t try to squeeze too much in! I was really challenged with the shorter 20-minute time that works best for online talks, compared with the usual longer 40 minute in-person track session. I created a shorter presentation focused on fewer key points, took some notes, and did a dry-run or two on my own to ensure that I did not run over.

Practice: Do a couple of dry runs so that you’re certain about what you want to say, and how you’re going to get your message through. The better prepared you are, the less focused you’ll be on your notes during the presentation.

Stand up! If at all possible, stand up during your presentation 🙂 I found that I got more energy when I was standing up, and using my gestures as I would normally do in a physical presentation.

We hope that’s helped spark some ideas for your next presentation. If you want to see our speakers in action and learn some incredible new ideas for your testing, get your ticket to EuroSTAR here.

We’re getting ready for a high-energy, jam-packed, 3-day online celebration of testing next month. The 2021 programme is lined up with many of the world’s greatest testing experts, including Maaret Pyhäjärvi, Rik Marselis, Janet Gregory, Michael Bolton and lots more.

Right now with our Early Bird ticket offer, you can save €100 and secure your place at EuroSTAR. But hurry, our offer is closing in two weeks! If you can’t join us for all 3 days, the talks will be available on demand for 6 months after the conference, so you can catch up on anything you missed and continue learning.

Supercharge your testing

With 6 keynotes, 14 half-day tutorials, & 30 track sessions, EuroSTAR 2021 is a packed programme filled with new learnings on all the topics you care most about. Our expert speakers are eager to share their knowledge and help you add new ideas, processes, and ways of working to your testing toolkit. Get hands-on learning at our tutorials with lots of insights to get your creativity flowing, plus plenty of actionable ideas to take home. Check out our full programme.

Become a stronger team

EuroSTAR is made for teams: boost your team’s performance, learn new skills, solve problems together, and of course – bond as a group. Share the learnings by splitting up and attending talks based on different skills and knowledge. Want to hear firsthand why Eurostar is for teams? Check out this short case study by Murex, who have attended the conference for seven years. The best part? We have incredible offers for groups – check them out here.

Solve challenges

EuroSTAR is a melting pot of creativity, with some serious brainpower all coming together. Bring your toughest questions to our testing experts: our community loves a challenge, and you’ll connect with peers who have faced similar obstacles. Attend Ask Me Anything sessions and live Q&As, and if you have a testing challenge you’d like 1:1 help on, we solutions sessions with ‘test doctors’ at our dedicated Test Clinic.

Make global connections

Make new friends with your fellow testers from all over the world. Connect 1:1 on video chat, try speed meeting for a fun and easy way to meet new people, and jump into conversations about all things testing at our community sessions. Plus, we’ve got all your Huddle favourites such as the Test Lab and plenty of challenges, exercises and games.

Explore new tools

Stay on top of what’s coming next in testing tools by visiting our virtual expo – it draws some of the biggest companies in the world, armed with solutions to help you improve the way you work: check out product demos, ask questions in video chats, and enter competitions to be in with a chance to win some very cool swag!

Don’t waste another second – book your ticket now and join us in September.