Video Transcript
Hi, my name is Sanne Visser. I am the EuroSTAR RisingSTAR Award Winner 2018 and today I’m here to tell you what I have done since I’ve won the prize and what the developments are in my work so far.
In November, I won the RisingSTAR Award for the best idea in testing, best new idea, which is building a blockchain testing community and a blockchain testing framework. That’s what I based my entry on and that’s why I won the award.
So, what have I done since then?
Well, the main thing is, as a RisingSTAR winner, you get two things. You get a bit of money and you get support from more than 30 people (test experts) who each give you 4 hours of their time (mentorship). I’ve been working on that and the first thing I did was to build in a break. I took about a month and used the money from the award to allow me to do this. Just to create thinking time.
You need to think about if you’re going to build a framework:
- What’s it going to look like?
- How are you going to find your community?
- How are you going to build your community?
- Where are these people?
- How are we going to connect them?
So I took a month and I basically spent the whole month writing, just putting things down and putting them on paper. Thinking about blockchain testing, developing the idea to a point where I thought I had really good starting point to start connecting other people to this idea.
Since then I’ve also started a meetup. A blockchain testing community. It is going really well. We have about 20 active members and we have about 60 members on meetup itself, and new people show up all the time. We’ve also had to look at how do we onboard people who don’t have the blockchain knowledge and we’ve developed into little subgroups. The blockchain testing framework is not one of those, but we’re still working on testing hardware nodes and a whole bunch of other stuff. It’s super cool to see the support.
At the same time built on this plan, I could really look at my list of Supporters (RisingSTAR mentors) and match where I had either knowledge gaps or advice that I needed and started reaching out to these experts.
- We’ve looked at building bug taxonomies.
- We’ve looked at how to use social media to create support for the community.
- I’ve been looking at intellectual property rights and getting advice for that.
So all these different types of expert advice is now easier because I can match them to my idea and then reach out to the proper experts. I get a lot of help from that as well from some other sponsors because the Supporters can specifically recommend someone for a specific question.
What I would advise anyone who’s thinking about a new idea in testing, maybe you’ve been walking around with this thought that there’s something cool that you could do with test automation? Maybe you’re a quantum computing person? You’re AI? Anything that you think is really new in testing, definitely send in your idea to the RisingSTAR Award. Try and win it because your idea will grow exponentially if you get this support. I can highly recommend anyone to apply for it.
For the 2019 EuroSTAR RisingSTAR Award, I hope that it’s your idea that wins and most of all just apply because it’s so interesting to see all these innovative testing ideas and to see testing as a competence just grow and develop.
From the EuroSTAR 2018 Winner, I hope you are the next RisingSTAR Award winner!
Thank you so much,
Sanne Visser
