The EuroSTAR 2024 Call for Speakers

For three decades, the EuroSTAR Conference has been the leading software testing conference in Europe, attracting delegates and speakers from around the globe. They have one thing in common: all of them are on a quest for knowledge, eager to learn, trying to improve themselves and their testing, and expand the testing community.

*The EuroSTAR 2024 Call for Speakers is now closed *

The 2024 Call for Speakers is now closed. To stay up to date on all the EuroSTAR news including programme announcements, special offers, and more, sign up to our mailing list.

For EuroSTAR 2024, we’re asking for presentations and papers that shine light on testing and on testing work. Our theme, “What Are We Doing Here?”, is a wide-open question, with lots of possible interpretations and related questions.

For instance:  what kinds of testing are being done here at work, in particular situations and contexts? What services are we providing to our organizations, to our management, and to our colleagues?  What are we discovering, and how are we discovering it? How do we make sure that testing is relevant, powerful, and valuable? These flavours of the question invite storytelling and experience reports. Compelling stories will get special attention and precedence as we develop the programme.

Then there are more general questions about the activities of testing. What is it like to design testing? To perform it? How do we go about the business of learning about our products and services to investigate risk?  What role do tools and techniques play? How have these changed over time, and how are they changing?

Who is “we”? The typical focus for EuroSTAR is on testers, of course — but we’d also like to hear from other members of the project community.  Who are we working with? How are we collaborating — or coming into conflict? How are we navigating through the sometimes-rough political and emotional waters of software development work?

“What are we doing here?” might represent a critique or a cry of distress. We may be worried about the practicality of what we’re doing, or we may be concerned about ethics.

Perhaps most importantly, there’s the existential question about our identity as testers. What is the testing role? What is our purpose? How do we, as testers, help to defend value by finding problems that matter?

Topics for EuroSTAR 2024

We’re looking for stories about testers’ experiences in testing work. We’re most eager to hear stories about how you…

• learned about products though experiencing, exploring, and experimenting
• recognised, investigated, and reported bugs in your product
• analysed and investigated risk to the business
• invented, developed, or applied tools to help find problems
• learned, developed, and applied a new and useful skill
• communicated with and reported to your clients on the product and testing stories
• established, explained, defended, or elevated the testing role
• created, led, managed, or fostered testing groups or development organisations
• recruited and trained people, and how you developed their skills to produce diversified and inclusive teams
• made crucial mistakes and learned from them — and helped other people to learn, too

Talk Types

Conclusion

And finally, all the way through EuroSTAR 2024, we’ll be asking and reflecting on what we are doing here at the conference — and what we are doing at conferences and meetups more generally — to learn from each other? The key aspect of a conference is conferring.  For experience reports, track talks, and keynotes, two-thirds of the allotted time will be dedicated to your presentation, in which participants will be allowed to ask clarifying questions only. One-third of the time slot will go to facilitated discussion, questions, and feedback. Prepare accordingly!

Regards,

Michael Bolton
EuroSTAR 2024 Programme Chair

Note: If you would like help writing a proposal to increase your chances of success, see this guide to the types of talks and what the Programme Committee are looking for as well as tips on to creating a submission for EuroSTAR 2024.