Ronan Healy

It can be quite daunting attending a conference for the first time or attending a conference on your own. People talk about how important networking is, but when there are so many people, it can be difficult to know where to start. A good conference makes you push past your comfort zone. Making connections and meeting new people is a great way to improve your conference experience.

We have compiled some top tips to help you discover how to network at a conference. One of the best ways to start networking is in the Expo area. Here are some great ice breakers..

Stickers

At EuroSTAR, stickers become a great conversation starter.  Go the Community Huddle to find the sticker table to personalise your conference badge with stickers that represent you.  It makes it very easy to strike a conversation to see you have something in common with someone.

Swag

Who doesn’t love free stuff?! Go on the hunt for some cool conference swag in the expo. You’ll never know who you’ll end up talking to while you’re searching for some free goodies. The exhibitors always have plenty of cool stuff to giveaway. View who will be exhibiting at the EuroSTAR Conference in Prague.

Games

There’s always something going on the expo. Explore the expo to see what’s going on. Whether it’s the Huddle, the Test Lab, Expo stands, there are so many games and opportunities to chat to people while playing. It’s a great way to break the ice. Whether it’s a game of exploding kittens, a game of fishing in the duck pond. Also – there are plenty of prizes up for grabs!

Visit the Huddle

Visit the Community Huddle to help you meet new people. There are always events going on (the schedule will be released in October). You can meet speakers, other attendees, volunteers. Attendees hang out here for some down time in-between and during sessions also.

Grab a Tea or Coffee

You may have to queue for coffee, so while in the queue be sure to strike up a conversation with the person next to you. OR if you don’t want to wait, some of the exhibitors have coffee machine in their stands so go find them!

So there’s our top tips & ice breakers for how to network at a conference. Some information is for the EuroSTAR Conference, but these tips can be brought to any conference you attend!

Book your ticket to #EuroSTARConf today and join the testing community in November for 4 days of testing excellence. 

Final call for volunteers for the EuroSTAR Conference, Prague 📢 The Volunteer Programme closes Aug. 31st. Lets celebrate testing this November at #EuroSTARConf! We are looking for dedicated and passionate people to be part of the conference team.  Volunteers are core members of the conference and strongly influence the success of the event.  We have compiled a list of the top reasons and benefits of volunteering at a conference.

Upskill

Conferences develop your career, your skills, your thought-processes and expose you to new elements of your industry.  Learn from industry experts through the entirety of the conference. Whether its in a track talk, a tutorial, talking to an exhibitor, attending a couch-session, hands-on testing in the test lab, or solving your problems in the test clinic, EuroSTAR provides 110+ hours of learning.

Work Experience

Volunteering always stands our on your CV. Especially if its in an industry that you would like more experience and to work in. Make your CV stand out by putting EuroSTAR Conference on it. 

Networking

How often are you in a room with 1,000+ individual that share similar interests, passions, challenges as you? Networking unlocks so many opportunities. Whether its meeting the people you chat to on twitter, making new friends, meeting an expert, or even a new potential job opportunity. The more you network the better! Check out this year’s awesome networking events in Prague.

Budget

Attending conferences can be quite expensive. It can often be difficult to get approval of budget to attend a conference (we can help secure approval). By volunteering, you get access to the conference for free, with the freedom to attend sessions when you’re not on the schedule.

Attending Sessions

Volunteering is a two-way exchange. You put time into volunteering, in return you can attend your favourite sessions! View the programme to decide which talks you want to attend well in advance of arriving.

Reach beyond your comfort zone and volunteer at a conference, it’s an incredible experience with great memories! Volunteer for #EuroSTARConf, Prague. Entries close 31^st Aug, so don’t miss your chance to be part of this year’s conference team! Enter volunteer programme today.

In this blog, the 2019 committee have recommended for an experienced testers. This journey is for people who want to look outside of “standard testing”, someone who has been around long enough and has seen lots of test design techniques, exploratory testing etc.

Monday

Tutorial D – Designing for Inclusiveness – Workshop on Accessibility by Parimala Hariprasad  & Jyothi Rangaiah.

Does your website or mobile app create an inclusive experience for people? Does your organization incorporate accessibility standards for all its products? Did you know that accessibility is a legal mandate and a fundamental expectation in many countries? If the answer is yes, this workshop is for you.

The main objective of the workshop is to make testers become efficient in solving accessibility problems for differently abled people using technology in varying capacities in their daily lives.The workshop includes helping the participants recognize problems, glorify their strengths, acknowledge their weaknesses and focus on problem solving for differently abled people in the technology world. This can be achieved by a combination of training, demos and hands-on testing exercises.

Alternative: Optimising agile testing to your context by Fran O’Hara

Tuesday

Tutorial J – Working Well with PCT by Rik Marselis

In my opinion testing conferences should be about … testing. Most testers know how to (or instinctively do) apply boundary value analysis and some other basic approaches and techniques. But what about some more advanced test design techniques?

This half-day tutorial is dedicated to just one test design technique: The Process Cycle Test. This technique is very useful when testing business processes, for example in an acceptance test. The test cases that you create can be proven to test every path in the business process. Or if you want to achieve better coverage (also called a higher test-depth-level) you can test all combinations of 2 (or 3 or 4) consecutive paths.

Alternative: Using quality characteristics for powerful testing and reporting by Henrik Emilsson and Rikard Edgren

Tuesday Track 2 – Immanual Kant and deep rationality of testing by Anders Dinsen 

Interacting with things always involves the complexity of experiencing and learning.

Kant’s philosophy supports the thinking, imagining, and rational tester to collaboratively engaging the team to educate people who matter on things that matter. The outcome we search for is driving collaboration and development in the organization.

After the talk, we’ll be able to say “transcendental knowledge” and understand what it means; we’ll understand the basics of Kant’s philosophy; we’ll know why intuitions sometimes matter more than facts when people collaborate about experiencing and learning; finally, we’ll see the power of narratives as the rational way to express what’s real and what’s not and helping stakeholders gain trust and good gut feeling about the system.

Tuesday Track 8 – How To Become As Agile As Your Team by Maud Lundh

What happens when your working method and processes are turned upside down? A few years into my career, I was the test manager for a new project labeled as “extremely agile”. What I learned early on was that the way to develop a project from start to finish had changed.

The project used a new process called “Conceptual Development”, a design-driven, lean development process. “Conceptual Development” focuses on customer collaboration and pushing through frequent deliveries from concept through design all the way to development. With a more traditional agile process, requirements would have first been planned and developed, before being tested near the end of a delivery. Now we tested concepts and prototypes first, and every prototype and design was its own delivery. This new process opened up new possibilities of testing since everything was testable from the get-go.

With “Conceptual Development” it is important to fail quickly and test with actual users before a single line of code is written. This new way of lean startup created new challenges for our team. Everyone needed to implement “Design Thinking” in their work. So how did we approach this new way of working as a team? Did we learn new skills and techniques, or just adapt those we had in a new environment? And what were the results?

Maybe more importantly, what did we learn?

Wednesday

W5 – Story Telling for Testers; A Crash Course by René Tuinhout

Why is one storyteller more effective than another?

And can you learn to tell stories more effectively?

You can indeed! 

We’ll start this crash course with a short introduction into storytelling. Then we’ll do a number of exercises to get acquainted with the storytelling basics.

Questions like: How to set up a good story? How to enthrall an audience? and How to create a powerful story for an audience with a varied background? will be covered in this high-speed-talk.

W14 – Reframing Software Testing In The Light of AI by Dr. Chris McKillop

This workshop gives a firm grounding in what AI is, and what AI is not. We explore the deceptive nature of some AI, and the social and personal consequences of poorly designed and implemented AI. AI means that software is moving from deterministic outcomes, to a variable range of outcomes, which adds additional complexities, and responsibilities, on testing in the new future of AI. This tutorial gives you the knowledge and techniques to evolve your practice and update your skill set.

 AI is changing the nature of software, as well as the human processes involved in developing it, as immense, rich, and complex data sets become an intrinsic part of the systems we develop. This tutorial will give you the tools you need to improve the efficiency and precision of your testing practice.

Thursday

TH2 – My AI Was Wrong by Laurent Bouhier

“My AI was wrong,” but isn’t it more like “I was wrong about my AI”?

The difficulty in testing AI comes from the ambivalence of this proposal. To differentiate between the 2 assumptions mentioned, the presentation will briefly show what an AI is (historical), how it learns (machine learning) and how it can be misled, voluntarily or not (cognitive bias or learning bias), and in which sectors of our daily lives they intervene today, and all this with playful illustrations. This is to emphasize the difficulty of testing AI, on the one hand because of the unpredictability of the expected result (problem of the “classical” test oracle) and on the other hand by the shortening of the development cycle of all these new features (IoT, Robotics…).

TH5 – When SciFi Becomes Reality: Deep Learning & IoT by Jaroslaw Hryszko

In 1961, Stanislaw Lem, the author of science-fiction novels, raised an interesting problem in one of his books – when the number of computers in the world exceeds the ability of people to control them, the correctness of their operation will have to be verified also by machines: computers will test computers.

In my speech, I would like to present in a simple and funny way the idea of applying deep learning in the process of testing complex IoT systems. I want to explain a general idea and then I will show solutions and tools that allow for effective testing of the Internet of Things, like TensorFlow – an open source library available for everyone.

Th11 – Guess the Number by Rikard Edgren & Henrik Emilsson

In this workshop we will do an exercise called Guess The Number.

It is a simple, but difficult exercise consisting of a Windows executable with a command-line interface, so many of you must bring computers. We will split up in groups, because it is even more difficult on your own. It stimulates logical thinking, critical thinking, and creativity.

Most of you probably won’t solve the exercise in an hour, but we will break at that time so we can do a proper debrief. You will not get actual hints, but might get inspiration about how to think. Some of you will be frustrated, or even upset, but that is not dangerous. It can be solved in 10 minutes; if that happens, we will pat your back and you can watch the others struggle.