Virtual Conference

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

4. Community spirit in Huddle

EuroSTAR is a global gathering rooted in community. And of course, the heart of that community lies in Huddle – we invite you to take part in all the conversations and fun that happens in our amazing community sessions throughout the conference.

It’s also an ideal place to go if you’re a first time attendee. Here are just some of the great things happening this year: we’ve got Lean coffee every morning as a great way to kickstart your day, bonus sessions with speakers on topics such as collaboration, mob testing, building your personal brand, and lots more; plus the Huddle Hangout Games Party on Monday, and lots of chances to win prizes and giveaways.

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?

7. The cool prizes and swag

Trying cool new tools and demos from vendors is all part of the conference experience, and our online expo will be buzzing. It draws some of the biggest companies in the world armed with solutions for you, and it’s a great place to visit between sessions. Stay on top of what’s new in testing tools, check out tons of cool demos, get 1:1 help on video chat … and of course, win prizes and bring home some cool swag. Visit the Expo booths throughout the conference to find out how you can get your hands on some of these incredible prizes.

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.

10. Making new friends at SpeedMeet

With online networking opportunities, it’s easier than ever to make connections at EuroSTAR. A SpeedMeet is a great way  to strike up a conversation with someone new, or a very familiar face! Our speed meet event lets you meet people for a 3 minute chat. Simply enter the speed meeting room and click to start chatting. Exchange details so that you can continue talking in 1:1 video chats on the platform if you run out of time and want to keep chatting – something that happens regularly to our attendees!

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.

Leon heads up the delivery function at Inspired Testing as the Chief Delivery Officer, after spending 16 years working in the UK and Europe, at various high profile companies, gaining best of breed experience at some of Europe’s most leading companies. He has 20 years’ experience in the software testing industry and is passionate about software testing and in particular shaping custom solutions for clients, based on the clients exact needs.

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.

Andrew Brown, Expleo.

EuroSTAR track talk: Software Quality and Human Factors – our next challenge

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.

Isabel Evans – Independent Consultant

EuroSTAR track talk: Who are we? What are we doing? How are we doing it?

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.

Gáspár Nagy – Spec Solutions

EuroSTAR tutorial: Living Documentation with BDD: Structure, Consistency, Traceability

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.

Gitte Ottosen – Key2Quality

EuroSTAR track talk: Quality is not about testing… It’s about value!

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.

2021 EuroSTAR Programme Chair, Fran O’Hara, and his committee; Janet Gregory, Derk-Jan de Grood, Sowmya Ramesh and Szilárd Széll have crafted an incredible programme of talks around the theme of “Engage”.  You’ll see sessions on Engagement with new approaches and technologies – for all you ‘trekkies’ out there, think exploring new worlds of testing. Engagement with teams and colleagues – collaborative approaches and techniques, mental health, coaching and personal development, and more. Engaging people so they become interested in testing. A binding commitment to deliver quality and value to your customers and stakeholders and how testing can help you achieve that within your team and organisation – and many more.

Tutorials for Actionable Tactics

Get ready for a blast of knowledge from 14 tutorials with expert trainers ready to teach and ensure you leave with a testing toolkit armed with new skills, tactics, tips, and tricks.

A selection of EuroSTAR 2021 Tutorials

Join Gáspár Nagy, coach, trainer and test automation expert, for his half-day tutorial on Living Documentation with BDD: Structure, Consistency, Traceability. Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) is becoming more and more commonly used at bigger enterprises and in larger projects. BDD encourages collaboration on the requirements which is definitely useful for larger projects as well. Bigger projects require a bigger specification set (more scenarios), so finding the right structure is crucial for keeping your living documentation (BDD scenarios & automation) usable. In Gáspár’s tutorial you will discuss and practice ideas that will help to improve the structure, consistency, and traceability of BDD living documentations. This tutorial is suitable for all roles and there are no special technical or coding skills required.

Get to grips with overcoming resistance within your team with Anne Colder & Jantien van de Meer in their tutorial Engage Resistance with the Power of ‘Verwondering’.  Testers frequently deal with resistance, reluctance and annoyance from peers. Anne and Jantien are going to help you deal with these behaviours, and give you tips to coax people to get to a point they might initially not want to go. You’ll learn about psychological models related to primal fears to identify why people resist or refuse. You’ll learn to analyse people’s behaviour so can you effectively overcome it.

Who better to get tips on learning through gamification than gamers … or more accurately, testers that test the games! Enter Jana Gierloff & Zoran Gjorgiev from the €1 billion+ InnoGames, makers of Forge of Empires, Elvenar, Tribal Wars and more. In their morning tutorial Teaching QA Through Gamification Jana and Zoran will help you understanding how a QA mindset can be coached through gamification to engage participants. They’ll give you usable learning approaches and ideas of how existing games can be transformed to reflect a development environment along with tips and tricks to make the most out of your efforts and avoid pitfalls along the way.

Agile Transformation Leader & Coach, Mette Bruhn-Pedersen is also hosting a tutorial at EuroSTAR 2021. The last 18 months has particularly shown how important it is to adapt to new conditions and respond to changes in customer demands. Companies are scaling agile approaches from team level to organisational level. How you approach quality and testing need to align with and support this change. During her tutorial on Test Leadership for Business Agility, Mette will look at typical quality and testing challenges when scaling agile, focusing on an organisational level as opposed to individual teams. You will learn how to leverage existing agile practices to scale quality. You will also gain new ideas for partnerships in your organisation in order to grow a quality culture.

Are you looking to improve your knowledge of AI and how it can improve your testing? Tariq King, Chief Scientist at test.ai and AI-driven testing expert, is the person to learn from! Tariq will be presenting a tutorial on Exploring the Intersection of AI for Testing on Tuesday afternoon (Day 1 of EuroSTAR 2021). He’ll explore the intersection of AI for software testing. You’ll learn the fundamentals of AI-driven test automation and then dive into some of the challenges, approaches, and practical issues around testing AI systems. With Tariq, and your fellow attendees, you’ll demystify AI for testing and use collective human intelligence to tackle open problems in this rapidly growing field. You’ll be able to identify some of the key challenges and methods associated with testing AI and ML-based systems as well as assess the need for designing AI/ML based systems with embedded self-testing capabilities.

We are delighted to welcome Michael Bolton back to EuroSTAR 2021 for his tutorial on Testing the Test Tools. Testing tools can lighten a software tester’s load and help see the invisible, but when used indiscriminately, they can also become a burden and a distraction. In Michael’s tutorial, you’ll examine the ways tools can focus testers on specific tasks and on particular perspectives of the product. You’ll consider potential value from tool use and both the subtle costs and hidden risks in strategies that centre on tools. You’ll look at how tools, while powerful and useful, can disengage from primary tasks: experiencing, exploring, and experimenting with the product to find problems that matter to your organizations and your clients. After attending this tutorial, you’ll have strategies for talking about tools with managers, developers, and other testers; connecting the insider view of testing with perspectives and pressures from the outside.

Be part of EuroSTAR 2021

In addition to the half day tutorials on day one, there is an action packed further two days of EuroSTAR, 28-30 Sept 2021 including engaging track talks and inspiring keynote presentations as well as bonus community sessions and non-stop networking. So, what are you waiting for? Get your ticket today and secure the best possible price whether you book an individual ticket (save €100) or bring your team (5-for-4 or 10-for-7 tickets).

The EuroSTAR Conference 2021 programme has dropped, and we’ve got a meteor shower of star speakers ready to spark your testing over 3 days of learning, connecting, and making new friends. Our speakers will share their expertise and help you become the best tester you can be. Start planning your 2021 EuroSTAR diary. 📝

3 days – 50+ countries – 1000+ testers – you

It takes a village

Let’s say hello to the 2021 Programme Committe, who carefully curated our incredible programme: Programme Chair, Fran O’Hara (Ireland), and his committee: Janet Gregory (Canada), Derk-Jan de Grood (Netherlands), Sowmya Ramesh (U.K.) and Szilárd Széll (Finland). They were helped by our community reviewers from all over the world, who gave their time, knowledge, and experience to help create the programme.

Check out some of the incredible topics and speakers we’ve got in store for you.

Keynotes for aha! moments 

EuroSTAR Testing Excellence Award winner Maaret Pyhäjärvi talks about automation, Michiel Boreel discusses digital happiness in the age of customer obsession, while Rob Lambert will take attendees through 10 communication principles to support rapid change. Hear Aprajita Mathur on testing software for DNA Analysis, and Janet Gregory on engagement being a state of mind… 

Tutorials for actionable tactics 

The programme features 14 half-day training tutorials on day one. Get ready for a blast of knowledge from 14 tutorials, covering all the topics that you want to know more about: QA, automation, communication, BDD, testing in the cloud, artificial intelligence, and so much more. The EuroSTAR tutorial trainers are ready to teach you how to improve your testing, and ensure you leave with a toolkit armed with new skills, tactics, tips, and tricks. 

Track talks to make you think 

Choose from 30 sessions on a wide range of testing topics. Gitte Ottosen shows why quality is about value, Peter Collewijn & Hannie van Kooten talk testing AI systems, Andrew Brown delves into the next challenge in software quality, Mili Oruevic discusses the end of the world (it’s not what you think), and SO much more. 

Connections & conversations 

EuroSTAR is a global gathering rooted in community, so of course we have plenty of community sessions on diversity, career advancement, wellness and much, much more. Get your testing challenges solved at the Test Clinic, take part in Lean Coffee, stretch out with yoga, and enjoy non-stop networking opportunities with testers from all over the world.

If you book your ticket before 30^th June you unlock 6 headliner talks that you can access right away – so you can start your upskilling journey with us now.

Take the whole team and save up to 30%. Team tickets start at €385 per person, which includes access to all 3 days and post conference on-demand talks.

See you in September!