The RisingSTAR Award, supported by EuroSTAR Conferences, James Lyndsay and Bart Knaack, was created to stimulate innovation and encourage new ideas in the software testing industry. The RisingSTAR brings together many of the most influential testing minds as a supporting group to help develop winning ideas for the overall benefit of the industry.
It has been six months since entries opened for the first ever RisingSTAR Award. The submissions were narrowed down to six finalists spanning five countries Biju Abraham (India), Brendan Connolly (United States), Rami Dahmosh (Israel), Roman Iovlev (Russia), Eric Jimmink (Netherlands) and Sanne Visser (Netherlands). Following voting by the panel of thirty-two highly respected RisingSTAR supporters, Sanne Visser of NS has been announced as the 2018 RisingSTAR Award winner.
Sanne originally started in testing in a consultancy environment gaining exposure to many different industries and techniques. Increasing her competencies, Sanne was awarded her Scrum Master certification shortly after joining Dutch Rail 6 years ago. Being part of such a large company has enabled Sanne to move across a hugely varied range of projects and led to her uncovering the need to raise awareness of blockchain technology. Following her initial interest in cryptocurrency, Sanne noticed that that many testers were not validating blockchain elements of their systems, and started to focus on how to test blockchain. There are currently relatively few Blockchain software projects so Sanne then began lobbying internally for related projects to gain more knowledge. This led to her winning idea!
As described by Sanne “my primary goal is to enable people without any IT or Blockchain knowledge to understand the most basic principles so that they can ask the right questions before considering a blockchain solution. Most coverage of blockchain in the media is about cryptotrading, scams and bitcoin exchange rates. It misrepresents the technology and overhypes the risk that a blockchain solution is vulnerable to scamming from third parties. This is the first part of my mission, to inform. To break down complex technology into terms anyone can understand.”
Following this, Sanne aims to develop a testing framework for dealing with Blockchain-based applications as well as forming a Blockchain testing group to share knowledge to benefit the entire testing community. Each RisingSTAR supporter has committed to support the winner with a half-day of their time. Sanne will use that support to help her develop a workshop with a demo-blockchain environment, allowing her to teach testers about the technology, and to let them experiment with ways it might be tested. As the 2018 RisingSTAR winner, Sanne will be provided with an ongoing platform on the EuroSTAR Huddle online community with updates on her progress as well as an opportunity to present the overall concept and updates at next year’s EuroSTAR Software Testing Conference in Prague.
Beyond recognising and rewarding great ideas, the RisingSTAR Award is about encouraging new voices and developing future leaders in testing. Great ideas can come at any time and to get ideas flowing, the 2019 RisingSTAR Award is now open for entry. If you have a great idea that could change the testing world, don’t wait, submit now! Candidates will be shortlisted next April.
For more details see https://huddle.eurostarsoftwaretesting.com/the-risingstar-award/
