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We’ve had an incredible 4 days at EuroSTAR 2022! Talk about returning to work exhilarated and full of energy from all the amazing sessions last week… we learnt from 70 speakers and hung out with more than 1000 software testers from all over the world to chat, share learnings, and make friends. Thanks to everyone who joined us – and helped us celebrate 30 years of EuroSTAR in style. We spotted this gorgeous comment on LinkedIn:

Looking back at the past 4 days at EuroSTAR 2022 in Copenhagen, it was not just a celebration of the 30th anniversary of the conference. It was a celebration of learning, courage and life.” 

Brijesh Deb, Netherlands  

Here are some of the highlights of this year’s conference.

Inspiring talks

With 70 expert talks to choose from, attendees were spoilt for choice. There was even a thread on the conference app discussing how hard it was to choose between talks! Thank you to each and every one of our speakers – we’ve received some incredible feedback on your sessions. If you missed them, Zeger Van Hese curated some wonderful sketchnotes of some of the talks at EuroSTAR and our attendees posted lots of their highlights on social media using #EuroSTARConf – check them out. We will also be sharing blogs on EuroSTARHuddle.com with your questions answered. Rikard Edgren’s Keynote Q&A is now available.

Drawing Lines Around the Fog: The Shape of Testers, Teams and the World | Alex Schladebeck

The world is constantly changing, and everything is impermanent. After the last two years, we have been forced to come to terms with how quickly and drastically things can change. How will external changes shape our teams and our work? Alex looked at what factors are at work now, and what kinds of effects they will have on how we work, and the roles of testers and software professionals.

Lost in Transformation | Michael Bolton

More and more organizations are taking on “digital transformation”, leaning on software and machinery to perform jobs, make decisions and solve problems. The reach of what machines can do is extended by technological advancements, growing bodies of data, and by human ambition. As software changes, our testing has to respond. Michael Bolton shared what you need to address when going through a digital transformation.

Testing Self-Driving Cars in a Big Data World | Johan Jonasson and Sofie Lindgren

The competition in the automotive industry is fierce, and everybody wants to be the market leader in autonomous driving. Johan Jonasson and Sofie Lindgren shared the skills necessary for an AI and machine learning driven future, along with how to win the autonomous vehicle race, and the role Big Data plays in developing the next generation of autonomous vehicles, as well as similar industries.

Shaping a Test Team | Paco Lorca

To develop the next big thing, start-ups and and new IT companies will be creating one or more agile teams from scratch.  Paco Lorca talked through the challenges of setting up a test team from scratch, why industry standard procedures don’t always work in your context, and why exploratory testing and excluding traditional test cases may be a good thing to consider.

EuroSTAR 2022 Awards

We had an amazing Awards Evening at the spectacular Wallman’s Circus – it was a night full of fun, dancing, music, acrobats, great food – and of course, award winners. The EuroSTAR 2022 Testing Excellence Award went to Anne-Marie Charett, who joined us via video link from Australia to accept. This is the highest honour bestowed by our community, and we are thrilled for Anne-Marie.

Kimberly Snoyl is the 2022 RisingSTAR Winner, which you can read all about on EuroSTAR Huddle. In addition to the Testing Excellence Award and RisingSTAR Award, we also celebrate our EuroSTAR speakers with conference awards. Best Tutorial went to Rik Marselis, while Lalitkumar Bhamare won Best Paper. The Best Paper will be released as an eBook on EuroSTARHuddle.com this month – keep an eye out!

Sophie Küster’s talk ‘You Don’t Talk about THAT at Work‘ was the most highly rated track talk of EuroSTAR 2022 and she claimed the coveted Do-Over Session on Friday afternoon. Talking about mental health is so important and we are glad to see Sophie’s talk getting this recognition by the EuroSTAR attendees.

Community Spirit

The Huddle Community Area was buzzing throughout the conference as everyone gathered in between sessions to chat, participate in games and challenges, and join some of our speakers at the speaker couch sessions. Thanks to everyone who joined in and embodied the conference community spirit. Fun fact – there were 13,868 messages sent via the app during the conference!

Of course we couldn’t talk about the community without mentioning our talented volunteers, who helped make the conference so amazing! They led the Community Huddle Area, assisted in sessions, and were on hand to help delegates with questions and photos! Thanks to everyone involved for their dedication and hard work.

Thank you to our Programme Committee

A massive thank you to our EuroSTAR 2022 Programme Committee; Graham Freeburn, Sue Atkins, Morten Hougaard, Bart Knaack and Tone Molyneux, for curating such a stellar programme of talks, and for bringing a wonderful mix of speakers together for us all to learn from. It was a truly special 30th EuroSTAR Conference.

Thank you all

We are truly blown away by how amazing our 30th conference has been. We’ve already received so much great feedback and kind words from delegates on how awesome it was! Thanks to everyone involved in this year’s conference, you made it very special, and we can’t wait to do it all again with you next year. See some of the photos uploaded by our attendees in the collage below.

We leave you with another heart warming comment from one of our attendees – this is what EuroSTAR is all about!

An incredible experience like never before in 1.5 decades of my QA career! An incredible opportunity to network, meet and share QA experiences with versatile test professionals in person! Interesting discussions, loads of fun & lots of food with fellow QA colleagues!”

Sudarsan Suriyanarayanan, Sweden 

Since 1993, we’ve been bringing testers together at Europe’s largest software testing conference. That’s 30 years of expert talks and sessions, sharing new ideas, and forming thousands of friendships.

This year, we’re having an extra special celebration as we mark 30 years of the software testing community! We have 70 sessions from 70 incredible speakers, and a global community of testers. It’s all here, and it starts tomorrow – we can’t wait.

It’s not too late to get your ticket and join us – book right NOW and choose from 1, 3, or 4 day tickets.

5 reasons to book your ticket now

Join a global community

It’s been two years since we met up with the software testing community in person, and we couldn’t be more excited to see everyone again, live in sunny Copenhagen! We’ll have lots of opportunities for you to make new friends, reconnect with some old ones, and expand your network. Every day, you can meet over coffee, converse in the Huddle area, & collaborate in tutorials. You’ll also get to enjoy the EuroSTAR at Night networking events – relax with drinks and conversation at the EXPO Community Networking party on Wednesday, and celebrate the best of the software testing community at the Gala Awards Night on Thursday.

Skyrocket your testing

The EuroSTAR programme is packed with talks from Europe’s testing trailblazers. Enjoy inspiring keynotes, tutorials, & track talks to get creativity flowing, with lots of actionable ideas to take home. Learn how to shape your testing with the best test design techniques, improve your testing abilities by uncovering your biases, learn how to develop your critical thinking skills, scale your team successfully, and LOTS more.

Solve testing challenges

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 our dedicated Test Clinic for 1:1 help from our test doctors – they have a 100% success rate! Here are just some of the questions they’ve helped answer:

• How do I set up a mobile device lab? What tools would you suggest?
• How do I improve my influence over my managers?
• How do I build in performance testing into my scrum teams definition of done?
• Are there any tips to help improve working in a distributed team?

Strengthen your 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. We have incredible offers for groups – it’s your last chance to get your team together at Europe’s best testing event! Check out team offers here.

Discover new tools

Stay on top of what’s coming next in testing tools, check out the demos, and add new processes to your testing toolkit by visiting the EuroSTAR EXPO. It draws some of the biggest companies in the world! Of course, this means there’s lots of prizes and swag up for grabs as well.

It’s all happening at EuroSTAR 2022 in Copenhagen – see you there!

If you’re new to testing or looking to progress to the next level in your career, we have lots of sessions on the EuroSTAR programme to help you do just that! Skyrocket your testing skills and make lots of valuable connections. Learn how to shape your testing with the best test design techniques, improve your testing abilities by uncovering your biases, discover powerful tools to help you with day-to-day tasks, and LOTS more.

Our programme committee chair Graham Freeburn has created a mind map so you can check out the whole programme and filter by topics, roles, and more so that you can find the talks best suited to what you’re looking for – check it out and start planning your EuroSTAR 2022 diary.

Test design with data combination testing and classification trees | Rik Marselis

Test case design is one of the core competences of the quality engineering & testing profession. If you want to properly shape your testing, which test design technique(s) do you use? And is it effective and efficient? What coverage can you achieve? Rik explores the Data Combination Test design technique, which uses Classification Trees.

This technique can be combined with 3 different coverage types, so you have a great way to align with the risk level of the application. Join Rik’s tutorial on DCT & CT and start applying his techniques, the very next day you return to work.

The good, the bad and the biased | Emma Lilliestam and Hanna Schlander

How does the brain work? Why do biases exist, and what are the pros and cons of biases? In this workshop you’ll learn about two thinking systems in the brain, and four categories of biases. We are all biased. Biases affect our everyday lives, both at work and at home. By learning more about them we can expand our view, shape our minds, and improve our testing abilities!

You’ll get the chance to deep dive into biases in groups, and discuss a selection of your favorite biases, before presenting your findings to the group.

Drawing for effective testing and learning | Davrondzhon Gafurov

You may have heard of the term ‘a picture paints a thousand words’, but what about ‘a drawing replaces 100 (textual) user stories’? Davrondzhon shares how you can improve quality assurance by using graphical representations.

Drawings can help you identify tests which are difficult to extract from (textual) user stories, especially negative test cases. Furthermore, drawings can be used not only for quality assurance purposes, but also as a tool for learning (for newcomers) and collaboration (to get a common understanding between various roles in team).

Toolsmithing – a live coding session crafting test tools on stage | Kristoffer Nordström

Even though testing is a highly intellectual pursuit, it still involves a lot of manual steps, laborious work, and tasks to perform. How many times have you had to unnecessarily download a bunch of files from a remote test server after running your tests, or download them via a browser, clicking on the links to the files and saving them?

In this live coding session, Kristoff used Python to show you short, powerful, and useful examples of small test tools, that address specific day-to-day tasks, of the same kind as the ones described above.  At the end of the day you will have seen several examples of how you can use Python when crafting your own test tools.

21^st century skills for a tester | Emna Ayadi and Ard Kramer

What are the skills that you need to survive the digital 21st century? Soft Skills! In this tutorial, Emna and Ard explore the skills a 21st century tester needs. This can be defined with 4 Cs; Communication, Critical Thinking, Creativity, and Collaboration.

How do those 4 C’s relate to testing? Are testers already applying those skills, or have they thought about how to apply them in the future? Learn how you can use them to communicate, how they apply critical thinking in their organization, how they collaborate with team members, and how they apply critical thinking as a tester.

Drawing lines around the fog: the shape of testers, teams, and the world | Alex Schladebeck

The world is constantly changing, and everything is impermanent. After the last two years, we have been forced to come to terms with how quickly and drastically things can change. How will external changes shape our teams and our work? How can we shape ourselves proactively in order to be able to respond to changes, make changes or our own and even thrive?

Alex looks at what factors are at work now, and what kinds of effects will they have on how we work, and the roles of testers and software professionals. She will also look at concrete activities on an individual and company level, to best prepare ourselves for a nebulous future.

Have you booked your conference tickets yet? It’s not too late to join us next week – book your ticket now and we’ll see you for a celebration of testing in Copenhagen.

Thanks to Eduardo Amaral, Quality Management Director at Noesis, for providing us this blog:

When I hear someone talking about test automation, its benefits, and the investment needed, I always remember an example I’ve recently witnessed: 50% of the regression tests were executed in an automated process for more than a year on a specific eCommerce app from a well-known company. This company had one Automation Engineer working full time on the project to achieve it.

The project also had a quality engineer to execute the remaining 50% of the regression tests needed manually, and all new features. These new features testing represented around 50% of the global execution, which means that the Automation Engineer (a more expensive resource for the project) was only handling 25% of tests delivered. The remaining 75% was executed manually!

It’s a fact that automation is needed and beneficial to the software development lifecycle. It is the only way to keep high-quality assurance standards in a fast-moving market. So, the 1 million dollar question is: What’s missing? Why are most of the companies failing in this automation effort? Why are they just replacing manual testing with automated testing without any efficiency gain?

On the contrary, if we consider that the development costs are higher than manual testing, the reality is that those companies are just increasing costs rather than reducing them (the primary goal of test automation).

There’s no correct answer or a magic solution to make automation happen and work, like in all other foundational changes. Because automation is such a trend and hype in the industry, many companies are just doing it because of it, without having a real need or a structured business case. And that is not a detail. Moving forward with a technical proof-of-concept instead of a proof-of-value is the wrong approach and reveals a lack of strategy!

Achieving success in automation strategy

This lack of suitable strategy regarding the company’s organization and needs, its application landscape, and business processes, makes the adoption of standard automation processes the obvious path – it seems so obvious that failure is not even considered. “If I execute these tests manually today, tomorrow I’ll hire an Automation Engineer and run them in an automated way without additional effort!”

Where can this line of thought fail? It’s simple: we only execute repeatedly (the justification for automation) if we are talking about an application that is constantly being upgraded. Those are the apps that require intense automation maintenance, which also means breakeven slippage and ROI underachievement. And it gets even worse when a manual tester, especially skilled in focussing on business processes and setting up quality assurance strategies according to risk analysis and error patterns, is replaced by an Automation Engineer focused on technology and test patterns.

To achieve success in any Automation strategy, it’s vital to coexist and optimize (not replace) these two profiles – manual tester and automation engineer – during the development lifecycle, taking advantage of what each approach can offer. And most of all, it’s necessary to understand the application’s characteristics and adopt the best automation strategy.

When we’re talking about solutions where time-to-market is crucial, it is impossible to succeed without a seamless continuous testing strategy, where test and validation happen on the continuous integration pipeline. On the other hand, evaluating complex application architectures with significant dependency levels and integration with other systems, such as ERP, Billing, HR, Legacy, etc., makes it difficult to have an efficient use case for automation. The focus must be E2E and only use automation on specific and routine quality assurance processes instead of trying to automate all testing frameworks.

Test automation will be an essential part of any Quality Management strategy in the future and a complement for quality assurance, that’s certain.

But, to have the ambition to automate all the process for every application developed is a dangerous path, with a great probability of not achieving the desired results and producing a financial loss.

Noesis is a Gold Partner at EuroSTAR 2022. It’s our first in-person event in 2 years – and it’s going to be a massive celebration of testing! Learn from 70 testing experts, and connect with your peers at Europe’s best testing event. Get your ticket now.

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EuroSTAR 2022 kicks off in just over a week, and it’s going to be our biggest year yet! We can’t wait to welcome software testers from near and far to Copenhagen for our 30^th EuroSTAR Conference.

Have you got your ticket yet? We have a limited amount of tickets left so book now, and secure your place at the best testing event of the summer! Here’s what you can expect…

Star keynotes

Our keynote speakers are driving testing forward with innovations – Smita Mishra talks about testing software for the next economy; Rikard Edgren shows you how to generate a good understanding of testing through continuous learning; Michael Bolton shares insights on testing through digital transformation; and Alex Schladebeck talks about the future of testing, and how it will shape teams and testers’ work.

Expert tutorials

This year we have 10 interactive tutorials on all topics from agile to strategy, new technologies, DevOps and lots more. Our speakers will share learnings that you can apply into immediate and actionable tactics, both personally and professionally.

Tutorial trainers this year include James Lyndsay, Rik Marselis, Anne Kramer, Gáspár Nagy, Emma Lilliestam, & Hanna Schlander.

Track talks

55 track talks means plenty of opportunity to join sessions that motivate your passions, whether you’re a new or experienced tester. Track talks cover everything from testing techniques to management, skills development, challenges and lots more… talks are followed by live Q&As so you can get your tough questions answered in real time.

Track talk speakers include Dorothy Graham, Michaël Pilaeten, Ard Kramer, Andrea Jensen, Kristoffer Nordström, and Isabel Evans.

Huddle Community Area

EuroSTAR is all about community – and Huddle is at the heart of it all. Take part in speaker couch sessions, community soapbox, lively conversations, fun games, and impromptu chats in the Huddle area. Talk to our Test Doctors at the Test Clinic to get even your toughest testing problems answered, try some hands-on testing at our Test Lab, and so much more.

Networking Events

Our evening events are extra special this year as we celebrate 30 years of EuroSTAR – join us on Wednesday night for the EXPO Networking Party: drinks, chats, and a chance to meet some new people. On Thursday night it’s the Gala Dinner Night, where we celebrate with a night of great food and a show at Wallman’s, followed by the EuroSTAR Software Testing Awards presentation. We can’t wait!

… and much more!

Of course, there’s also lots of spontaneous meetings that result in lifelong friendships – make new friends over coffee, lunch breaks, and in between sessions. You’ve also got access to the largest software testing expo in Europe, so you can check out the latest software testing tools and be in with a chance to win some cool swag and prizes!