EuroSTAR 2020 – A Sketchnoter’s Summary Part II
This is the second instalment of a two part series on my experience at EuroSTAR 2020. You can read part one here.
Day 3
The second day of the conference began with a keynote by Tomasz Dubikowski. He was sharing some “Real life stories of microservices testing“, including stories about micro mindset, contract testing, macro mindset, and the quality doctor’s toolbox.
Following that was “Surviving and thriving in the automation jungle” by Martin Gijsen. Martin presented the PUPPET Model which consists of the elements: Product, Understanding, People, Processes, Execution and Technology.
It’s all about making the difference for your users. In “Walk a mile in your user’s boots” Jørgen Lund shared how you can achieve great results for that by improving communication, building a learning culture and being passionate and enthusiastic.
The midday keynote was held by Tanja Vos. “GUI testing: From developing scripts to creating AI-enabled agents” was all about scriptless testing of the GUI, testing oracles, reinforcement learning and the tool Testar.
After the lunch break, Andrew Brown continued with “The Peltzman Effect – Why adding more test phases may not reduce bugs“. The Peltzman Effect, also known as risk compensation, is present in the software testing world and other IT areas. Not only this effect, but also other cognitive biases influence our way of working.
One of the hardest things about testing is showing the value of it to others. Ingo Philipp addressed this in his talk “Doing excellent testing is one thing, selling it to management is another“. He explained 8 selling principles:
- selling
- targeting
- consistency
- practicing
- collaboration
- connectivity
- differentiation
- debunking
In his talk “APIs are loose in the wild; how do we test them” Adam Sandman made clear, that once an API is published, it is out in the world and you can’t just change it as this might affect lots of applications. With versioning, looking at data formats and authentication and mocking, testing of APIs can be made a little easier.
The final talk of the day, and the conference, was the keynote by Jason Arbon about “AI testing in the wild“. He presented us the AI Superpowers and how you can use test.ai to release those.
The EuroSTAR Conference ended with the Award ceremony in which the winners of the best tutorial (Rikard Edgren) and the best paper (Gitte Ottosen) were announced. The highlight of the Awards ceremony was the Testing Excellence Award which was awarded to Maaret Pyhäjärvi this year. Finally the programme chair for 2021 was revealed to be Fran O’Hara.
All in all I can say that the EuroSTAR Conference 2020 was quite a success and that I had a lot of fun being there. I enjoyed the talks, the tutorials and connecting to the testing community all over the world. Well done, EuroSTAR team!
Read EuroSTAR 2020 – A Sketchnoter’s Summary Part I here.
About The Author
Katja Budnikov is a software tester and sketchnoter from Northern Germany. Katja is passionate about software testing and sketch noting! She loves attending events like EuroSTAR and sharing her experience and learnings with others on her blog Katjasays.com. Katja first started sketchnoting in 2016. First analogue with pen and paper and now digitally with an iPad and Apple Pencil.
In her work life Katja started out in online marketing, then specialized in search engine optimisation and is now a quality assurance specialist in both manual and automated software testing. Away from work Katja loves photography, especially taking photos of nature, including many of her dog Auri, a young Australian Shepherd, who is super cute and fun to take photos of. She loves to spend time with her dog and partner, going out for walks, traveling and eating cake at a nearby coffee shop with a beautiful garden.