I didn’t know what to expect from this year’s EuroSTAR conference. I’d only been once before, and so I wasn’t sure how much a different programme chair and committee, and a new venue itself would make a difference to the EuroSTAR experience. In addition I had the added pressure of being lucky enough to speak at the conference as well.

Fortunately none of the changes made a difference. It was a great conference, with some excellent speakers, fun things to do when the talks weren’t happening, and lots of opportunity to meet old friends and make new one’s. Paul Gerrard, the programme committee and the EuroSTAR conference organisers did a great job booking a varied programme and a well organised event.

Prologue

I arrived in Dublin on Sunday which meant that I was able to make it along to the early registration. This is a great idea which I hope happens next year, as well as being able to pick-up all the usual conference materials, T-shirt, etc early to save queuing, it also meant that those of us who had arrived early could easily get out and meet people. I had a great discussion with a couple of guys from Ericsson which brought back memories of my earlier career there. I was then lucky enough to bump into a number of people I knew as well. Dinner with Declan O’Riordan and Karen Johnson then followed, at which we had some excellent discussions about testing, contracting and life in general.

I spent Monday sightseeing. As an ex Nokian it was great to see this 🙂

Day 1

Day 1 started with the keynote from Andy Stanford-Clark. I really enjoyed it and it certainly made me think more about the Internet of Things, and the challenge it causes for testers. And also how I could automate my house 🙂

I followed this up with Amy Phillips talk about Testing In the World of Start-ups. I’ve recently started working with a team who are effectively in start-up mode and it was very useful to hear Amy’s experiences from Songkick. The main thing I took away was that the testers role within a start-up is very different to a larger company, with a more varied skill-set required and potentially less actual testing. I feel this is the way that testing is going these days anyway, slowly but surely.

My next session was from Rikard Edgren who presented about Trying To Teach Testing Skills and Judgement. It was an excellent talk, dealing with Rikard’s experience of training testers. He’s also produced a white paper with a lot more detail, that I’m going to read.

The final keynote of the day was from Rob Lambert. Rob talked about Continuous Delivery and DevOps and gave us his experiences from New Voice Media. It was a good talk and built upon previous talks I’ve seen Rob do, giving more detail.

Here’s my notes from the session.

Then it was time to learn how to pour some Guinness 🙂