The 27th EuroSTAR Software Testing Conference took place last week, 11-14 November in Prague. Each year a member of the testing community summarises each day in a blog to share with the Huddle Community. This year Katja Budnikov was busy sharing sketchnotes of each of the talks she attended from Tuesday to Thursday of the EuroSTAR Conference. Below is her first Community report – enjoy!
Tuesday at #EuroSTARConf
For the last few months I knew that I would attend EuroSTARConf 2019 as the Community Sketchnote reporter and I was very much looking forward to it. Attending a great conference with lots of amazing speakers with great talks, doing sketchnotes of the talks and then share them with the community – this is just awesome!
So Tuesday 12th November was the day, the day the conference part of EuroSTAR started in Prague (the tutorials are on Monday). The Prague congress center was huge and had lots of space for all attendees. The EuroSTAR team at the registration desk were really nice and welcoming. I received my badge, a backpack with information and an official t-shirt. That is so nice!
The program committee started the actual conference with some remarks. The theme this year is: Working well – purpose, practices, people, challenges. A fitting motto, in my opinion.
The first keynote was by Dr. Chris McKillop. “Developing your BS detector: The hype and reality of AI” was the title of the keynote. It was about the fact that there is still a lot of BS in the world of AI and she explained symptoms of it.
The 6 main symptoms are:
- Confusion
- Singularity fever
- Deception
- Failure
- Data obsession
- Empathy Dysfunction
Plus there is a bonus symptom: the Dunning Kruger Syndrome. The cure is: Knowledge plus ethics plus empathy.
The next talk on my agenda was by Andrew Brown about “Why is my regression pack full of junk tests? The Endowment Effect“. He explained that the Endowment Effect is about the willingness to accept being bigger than the willingness to pay. You would rather retain an object you own than acquire it. This is unconscious behaviour and can’t be modified easily. In regression packs we often tend to write more test cases than we can maintain, but we still add more tests. Think about what happens to them and if they can be abandoned. We are biased by things like the IKEA or the Status Quo Effect. We have to understand that problems often occur out of thought processes.
Viktorija Manewska spoke about “Unlearning to facilitate learning“. The brain is like a full cup of tea, to learn something new you need to unlearn something else. An example would be riding a backwards bike where if you turn right, you go left and vice versa. You have to unlearn how to ride a bike to be able to ride this new bike. Unlearning doesn‘t mean forget but getting rid of old models and habits. It‘s similar in software testing. A new colleague will click around like a real user and find bugs you haven‘t found because he isn‘t limited by the models you have and the habits you gained from your experience. Exploratory testing might help you. When you want to male a shift, you need to make it on 3 levels: individual, group and organizational.
The last point on the agenda for the Tuesday were the Lightning Talks by the tutorial speakers: Rob Lambert, Gáspár Nagy, Kristoffer Nordström, Iris Pinkster-O‘Riordain and Mais Tawfik Ashkar. Each of them had maximum 4 minutes to talk about a topic of their choice. Rob was talking about stake and outcomes vs. rank and perks, Gáspár about how to find smart solutions and make them available, Kristoffer about fun at work and how this can increase creativity and productivity, Iris about paying attention to unintentional human behaviour and Mais about paying attention to what you are paying attention to.
After the talks the Accenture Networking drinks started in the Expo area. While enjoying some drinks & snacks the attendees were able to mingle with each other and to talk to the exhibitors. The lucky ones that booked some of the night events were picked up by buses to go to either the Testers‘ Party at the Municipal House or the Community Dinner on a Vltava River Cruise. I took part in the Community Dinner. It took place on a boat riding along all the sights of Prague. You could enjoy the view, enjoy some nice food and drinks, listen to live music and talk to the other attendees. A great ending to a great day.
