Every year, we celebrate our incredible, inspirational community of testers who continuously strive to improve software testing for everyone. We invite you to help us highlight your testing heroes, the people who have forged new paths for testing, those who help mould and encourage our testers of the future and those that inspire you.
The winners are decided by the community. Whether you nominate your testing hero for the EuroSTAR Testing Excellence Award, encourage a colleague to submit an idea for the EuroSTAR RisingSTAR Award or vote for your favourite Tutorial at the EuroSTAR Conference, you can help make a difference!
Testing Excellence Award 2025
The 2025 EuroSTAR Testing Excellence Award winner was Keith Klain. This prestigious award recognises the people who have most influenced our testing careers – colleagues, mentors, coaches, and all those who help us achieve more.
This is a peer nominated award driven by the testing community. Nominations are now closed.
The EuroSTAR Testing Excellence Award is the highest honour bestowed by our community. This is the longest running award in software testing and is the ultimate recognition for those that continually give to the testing community.
This award has been won by some of the most influential testers in the world including Gerald Weinberg (Jerry), Dorothy Graham, Martin Pol, Isabel Evans and Maaret Pyhäjärvi.
EuroSTAR RisingSTAR Award
Sara Martínez Giner was the EuroSTAR 2025 RisingSTAR Award winner, for her idea called Testing for a Secure Digital Future.
The RisingSTAR Award was created in 2018 to stimulate innovation in the software testing industry. It aims to encourage testers to develop new ideas and provide support through mentorship.
EuroSTAR Conference Awards
In addition to the EuroSTAR Testing Excellence Award and RisingSTAR Award, we also celebrate our EuroSTAR speakers. Each year more than fifty testing experts, trainers, teachers and leaders share their knowledge with the attendees of the EuroSTAR Conference. Every year, we welcome 60+ speakers, all sharing their experience, challenges and solutions so that our conference attendees can bring new ideas and new ways of improving their testing back to the workplace. To recognise their continual dedication, we award the Best Conference Tutorial every year.
Best Tutorial
The Best Tutorial award has been a feature of the EuroSTAR Software Testing Conference since 2003. This Award is presented to the tutorial speaker who receives the highest score from attending delegates based on the content of their talk and presentation ability. The Best Tutorial Award has been awarded to some of the most notable professionals in the world of software testing including James Whittaker, Erik van Veenendaal, Anne Colder & Jantien van de Meer amongst others. Rahul Parwal has been voted the 2025 EuroSTAR Best Tutorial for Do you have a Testing Toolkit? Let’s Build One.
Best Paper Award
The EuroSTAR Best Paper Award is open to all speakers, with the winner announced as part of the EuroSTAR Software Testing Awards, receiving prestigious recognition from the entire community. Each year, EuroSTAR conference speakers have the opportunity to submit a technical paper to complement their presentation. These submissions are carefully reviewed by the Programme Committee, who select the recipient of the prestigious Best Paper Award. This year our winner is Usha Kandala with The Hidden Code: Bias Testing for Ethical AI in Healthtech.
To date, 25 exceptional papers have received this honor, with Zeger van Hese holding the record for four wins (2007, 2009, 2013, and a joint win in 2016). See all the winning Best Papers as eBooks on EuroSTAR Huddle.