Engage with the EuroSTAR 2021 Programme

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.