Back in the booth!

Last week PractiTest had the privilege of sponsoring and attending a large IRL event for the first time since the onset of the Covid pandemic, and what a blast it was. The 30th EuroStar Testing Conference was held in beautiful Copenhagen and saw an impressive number of ±800 attendees, from across the region.??

First impressions

Much praise should be given to the conference organizers for creating a great program of tutorials and sessions that touched on every aspect of testing from soft skills, to the latest technological trends. Just to mention a few:

Gitte Ottosen’s session: “Test Manager, Orchestrator or Quality Coach?” touched on points we place great importance on at PractiTest. While test strategy is still essential, especially in a scaled context, someone still needs to orchestrate tests for the solution end-to-end, and also focus on ensuring that dependencies across teams are addressed.

That said, Michael Bolton’s “Lost in Transformation” keynote also hit home, pointing out how we need to responsibly react to the current “digital transformation” in our field.

And Nancy Kelln’s keynote “What the Hell Kind of Testing Is That?” was so much more than a catchy title. While not the last session of the day, she was the last keynote speaker we managed to sit in on, and as promised she delivered a high-energy session that surely reignited attendees’ spark and passion for great software testing.

There were many more sessions of course, too many to mention here, but you can see what you might have missed here.?

Our main takeaways

For us, it was a great chance to reconnect in person with fellow QA and testing professionals, learn more about the challenges they face in their day-to-day lives, and explore what had changed as a result of Covid and the changes it had brought to our way of working.?

Not surprisingly, even more than before, one of the major challenges testing professionals are facing is the lack of visibility into the hard work being done, which is often not appreciated enough by higher management.?

That challenge was followed by traceability - the ability to link requirements to their corresponding tests, test runs results, and unfolding issue management. All the while avoiding the jumble of data being generated as each entity is created. This holds true to accountability and task management as well, which is often a potential weakness of test management projects.?

An additional challenge we heard about was the incorporation of test automation and CI/CD into the testing process. At PractiTest we have embraced this challenge and incorporate automation and CI/CD results into our test management capabilities, from running to reporting along with all other testing types.??

>> Here's a quick video recap from a few of our booth visitors on the challenges of testing and possible solutions:

All combined, it was a great affirmation of our vision of what test management needs to be and what it should provide - a visual and flexible hub for all possible testing needs.

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See you at EuroSTAR 2023!