I was lucky enough to be at EuroSTAR 2015 last week. As well as presenting my experiences and thoughts about the future of Test Management, I also spent most of my Wednesday in the rather excellent Test Lab.
If you go to EuroSTAR, or any other conference for that matter, and you don’t take the opportunity to do some testing, and talk and learn from people whilst doing so then I think you’d be really missing out. The Test Lab is a great place where you can just hang out with other testers, speakers and guru’s. It makes everyone really accessible. You can learn a lot.
You can also get extremely frustrated trying to figure out the various black box machines, other testing challenges and even how you might go about firing a rocket from a tank.
I did a couple of Mobile Testing sessions, the first for beginners and then the second one as a mob testing effort. We found lots of bugs – our app of choice for the testing was DrinkedIn (the drinkers LinkedIn – check, it’s a real thing and available for both Android and iOS :)).
I had great fun teaching, and I hope those who came along to my sessions went away knowing a bit more about mobile testing. If you are at EuroSTAR next year then be sure to get along to the Test Lab. Hopefully I’ll see you there.
This is the third part of my review of EuroSTAR 2014. You can also read about day 1 and day 2 in the previous posts.
Day 3
After a late night at the Gala party (well I had just presented at EuroSTAR so I reckon a celebration was in order) then I’m ashamed to say I missed the first keynote of the day. From what I hear it was good 🙁
My next session was ‘Stylish Mobile Testing’ with Dan Ashby and Nehir Yelkovan. I know both Dan and Nehir well – myself and Dan do the Testing In the Pub podcast together and I work with Nehir. So missing their presentation was not an option. I’d have gone along even if I hadn’t known them, the topic of the session being around mobile testing. It was a good session; they passed on lots of useful hints and tips on mobile testing and got a great double act going on.
After watching Rene Tuinhout talk about Passionate Dating for Testers (a talk I’d seen Rene do at the Romanian Testing Conference where it was just as funny), I settled down in the auditorium for the final keynote from Zeger Van-Hesse. My notes are below:
Following the keynote, and the announcement of the EuroSTAR 2015 chair and venue (congratulations to Ruud Teunissen and let’s hope we meet in Maastricht) then then there was a decision to make. Workshop or do-over session?
I chose the do-over session, an excellent idea from the conference organisers, whereby the attendees get to vote on what session they would like to see again. This year it was won by Declan O’Riordan. Declan has had a great year, after doing his first talk at SIGIST, straight after me in fact) then he’s spoken at a number of events and also won the best paper award at EuroSTAR this year. His talk about the ‘Why, Why, Who, How of Security Testing’ was in parts exciting, parts scary and really informative. A great final session.
Overall
This year’s EuroSTAR was a great event. It’s well run by a really passionate group, both the organising committee and the conference organisers themselves. The mix of speakers and topics meant that there was real variety and something different from last year. Congratulations to all who spoke, all who organised, and all who contributed in some way. I really hope I can make it back next year.
Day 2 started with Isabel Evans giving her experiences of a change project that went wrong. There was a lot of things to learn from here experiences but the main thing I took away was “it’s alway about the people”. People are the main factor in software development and the main factor in change. Understanding them if the key to effective change.
Here’s my notes from her session.
Next up I saw Michael Bolton give a very interesting and interactive session called ‘Every Tester Has a Price: Sources of Product and Project Information’. In it we went through different information sources and produced a large and detailed mindmap. I captured some of it below:
Note – it’s not complete and I need to get the rest of it from Michael.
Following Michael’s session I caught Kristoffer Nordström’s session on Gameification. This was a great personal account of how Kristoffer introduced gameification to a project he was working on, and what the results were. Certainly something that I’d like to see if I can use where I work.
My final session of the morning was another case study, this time from James Christie. James gave a very detailed and interesting study of a project he worked on for the UK government, whose primary goal seemed to be for the project not to appear in the UK news/ satire magazine Private Eye. While the project did not fail, (the programme it was part of did), it placed a great strain on the people involved and certainly was not the sort of project James would want to be involved with again. There were some clear lessons to learn, hopefully captured in my notes below.
After lunch it was my turn to talk about “Understanding Your Mobile User”. I was lucky, I had a good audience and they asked some great questions.
I spoke about ways you could understand mobile users, and why understanding the user is so important when mobile testing.
The final keynote of the day was from Julian Harty, who spoke about ‘Software Talk: Are We Listening’. Julian gave us some hints and tips on how we can listen to software, through analytics for example.
What happened next was a little bizarre. A guy from Smartbear got up on the stage and sang a song about testing, to the tune (and inspired by the lyrics) of Frozen, the Disney kids film. Not my cup of tea but some people enjoyed it I guess.
Then it was time for the Gala party – a great night at Croke Park, home of the GAA.
Note: Updated 11th Dec as a result of James’ comment below.
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.
The conference centre looked very impressive
I spent Monday sightseeing. As an ex Nokian it was great to see this 🙂
Someone really needs to update their advertising…
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 🙂
Some exciting news – I’m going to be presenting a webinar at the EuroSTARonline Software Testing Summit on 16th September. The virtual, online, conference is free to attend and there’s some great speakers. You should sign-up. You really should 🙂
I’m presenting a talk about “The Current State of Mobile Testing” and answering questions afterwards.
I’m interested to know what people are most interested in knowing about. Have you just moved into mobile testing and want to know the basics, or are you a more experience tester who wants some detailed information about a particular area of mobile?
Are you starting to use, or already using, automation for mobile?
Are you testing phones, tablets, set-top boxes, smart watches or Google Glass applications?
If you want to play a part in helping to define what I talk about, and hopefully learn something that will really benefit you, then get in touch.
At the start of this year I made a conscious decision to try and speak at more conferences. I think it’s important that those of us who feel happy standing up in front of crowds of people and talking about testing do so; it helps spread ideas and keeps things fresh. I also find it’s a great way of meeting new people, exchanging new ideas, and doing so while keeping the costs down 🙂
So, I’ve been making a real effort with my abstracts and submissions this year (a topic of a future blog post). And I think I’ve also got a bit lucky as well, since I’m speaking a few conferences this year. It’s all really rather exciting. The full list is below:
A great story about testing and learning from Alexandra Casapu in the ‘Do Over’ session. Her talk was voted as the one people wanted to see again, and it was well worth repeating.
A great presentation by Amy Phillips about how Songkick improved their development and deployment processes, and how they moved to continuous deployment.
Day 3 here at Eurostar kicked off with a keynote talk about questioning from Fiona Charles. There are many areas to question as you’ll see from the mindmap below. But for sure there are more questions than just these.
