The EuroSTAR 2023 tutorials are here to provide in-depth training and cutting-edge learning for you and your team. Solve problems, get new ideas, and LOTS of actionable takeaways.
Our 11 half and full day tutorials cover leadership, test automation, collaboration, management, and lots more. Gain insights to re-energise your testing projects and make your business stronger.
Want to learn more about how biases affect your testing? Improve your critical thinking skills? Learn new concepts and testing tools? This is where it all happens.
Full Day Tutorials
Inspiring Quality: Becoming an Exceptional Quality Leader
Fiona Charles
What does it take to become a quality leader? Inspiring quality is about much more than getting people to follow you. Find out the skills and personal strengths it takes to become an exceptional leader, and where to focus your energy. This interactive workshop will allow you to practice solving leadership problems, assess your potential, learn how to become the leader you want to be, and bring benefits to all the projects you’re working on.
Collaborative Test Design
Wim Decoutere & Michaël Pilaeten
When people work together, the outcome is often more successful than doing it alone – so why do we keep designing tests alone? Traditional test design techniques seem to be created for solo application. In this workshop, you’ll design great tests with your peers. Learn different techniques, and experience for yourself how well these techniques suit your need. The best part? You can take home the results that come out of this workshop. Not just the techniques, but also the test cases: expand your test design tool cases with techniques that you can practice with the whole team when you get back to work.
Let’s Build a Continuous QA Strategy around CI/CD Pipeline
Szilard Szell
Building a test strategy in DevOps is not only about test automation, but how built-in quality can be achieved in all steps of the SW development, within and outside of your CI/CD pipeline. Join this interactive tutorial to learn how QA is extended to the left and to the right in DevOps, how to design your QA pipeline using simple card games, and what else you need to have a full test strategy. Throughout the exercises, you’ll build a full test strategy with your team for pre-selected scenarios and contexts in breakout sessions, followed by presentations and discussions.
Half day tutorials
Measurement, Metrics, and Magic Numbers
Michael Bolton
Bugs that could have been found in requirements gathering cost 1000 times more when found in production. Testing costs 40% of the total development effort. As a tester, you’ve probably seen someone pull these kinds of numbers out of a hat. Numbers can be magical, but can also be deceiving. We must apply critical thinking when it comes to numbers – in this workshop, you’ll learn strategies and skills to help you think critically and confidently about numbers. Develop ways to provide reasonable, helpful answers when people ask for metrics, KPIs or estimates, and learn how to recognise when metrics are dangerous.
Building Better Teams Through Play
Jenny Bramble
How do we release tension and form the strong bonds that a good team needs to be successful? As adults, we lose the sense of companionship and playfulness that we had during childhood. Let’s bring it back! In this tutorial you’ll learn how to build bonds within your team, by playing games targeted towards solving common issues with teams such as conflict issues, agile concepts, and lots more. You’ll walk away with a set of games to help you solve problems – and maybe a prize…
CSI Testing – A Simulation Game
Adam Matłacz
Asking good questions and critical thinking are essential skills in software. Join Adam Matlacz to become a true QA detective by using the CSI testing framework. Play a simulation game where you’ll be assigned a role within the team of ‘investigators’. You’ll have to gather information to solve the puzzle – the success lies in how good your critical thinking skills are, and how well you master the art of asking good questions. Walk away with the knowledge of good team cooperation, and the ability to filter the valuable pieces of information from the noise.
Roll the Marbles! How Good Architecture Helps us to Test Better
Alexandru Cusmaru & Ard Kramer
Are we really aware of the value of solid architecture on our testing? Unfortunately, opportunities to improve our architectural decision-making are rare. In this tutorial you get to design and build a marble run track using the SCRUM way of working. Learn how important good architecture is, and understand its consequences for testing and quality in your team. Last but not least, have fun together playing with marbles!
Soft Skills of Automation
Jenny Bramble
In this half day tutorial, learn what it takes to think automation first, so that you can develop a mindset that leads you to create good automation. Jenny will show you how to interrogate the manual testing that you do and shape it to automation. You’ll also discuss and create tests using pseudo-code, and discuss what kinds of results you can expect from your automation. When you leave this tutorial, you’ll have a good idea of what it takes to think automation first, what types of testing are appropriate for automation, and what information we can get from automation.
Sharpen the Axe! An Adventure Game about Test Automation
Anne Kramer
Join Anne Kramer to experience in a playful way how to deal with typical challenges in test automation, such as chaotic product backlogs, legacy test scripts, deteriorating coverage, and lack of time. You’ll be split into groups of 4 and practice together well-established test design methods such as decision table testing, model-based testing, BDD, and keyword-driven testing. You’ll gain an understanding of how success and failure strongly depend on the way your team works together.
Social Software Testing Approaches
Maaret Pyhäjärvi
Collaboration between team members has a significant impact on the team’s ability to deliver value efficiently. We are all well aware of the need for developers, testers, product owners, and other team members to collaborate. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to improve collaboration skills in paired and grouped hands-on work, and learn how to foster collaboration in teams during remote work. Learn new approaches with a more social aspect in order to improve testing, and work better with developers.
Critical Thinking Skills for Testers
Michael Bolton
To be a great tester, you need to be a great critical thinker. The good news is that critical thinking is not just innate intelligence or a talent—it’s a learnable and improvable skill you can master. Critical thinking begins with five questions: Huh? Ready? Really? And? So? These questions kick-start your brain. In this hands-on workshop, you’ll practice and sharpen your thinking skills, and learn new ways to identify bugs.