Sadly the EuroSTAR Conference is over for another year. It was a great event in Dublin with the Convention Centre proving to be a popular and welcoming venue. The city offered delegates, speakers and exhibitors multiple opportunities to explore Irish culture and history. As part of the Conference events, there was an organised fun run, a literary pub crawl around Dublin city, the community dinner in Ireland’s oldest university; Trinity College and the grand Gala Awards dinner at the very impressive and historic venue of Croke Park. The week’s social events were rounded off with a trip to the Guinness Storehouse, Ireland’s most popular tourist attraction.
In between all the social events there was some Conference sessions too. Chaired by Paul Gerard with a committee team of Alexandra Casapu, Pusser Janvit, Mike Jarred and Henk van Merode. The conference kicked off with tutorials on Monday and Tuesday morning with the tracker sessions taking place Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.
This year TEST Huddle featured at the Conference for the first time and we has our own representatives there too. The winners of the Press Pass Competition Neil Studd, Kim Knup and Nick Shaw. Each of our winners had their own role for the week. Neil wrote about the Conference with his daily blog posts, Kim was the Test Huddle Community correspondent and kept everyone updated via the TEST Huddle Forums. Finally Nick was our vlogger for the entire event.
You should check out the preview posts from Neil, Kim and Nick to see how they compare to their experiences of the Conference.
Day 1 – Monday
Day 1 began with full day tutorials. For Neil, his highlight of the day was Fiona Charles session. “Inspiring Testers – Leadership Workshop”. Neil attended this session and had some very complimentatny words to write about it. The session included breaking into groups, one task which was setting riddles for other groups.
Thinking about leadership scenarios with @FionaCCharles “Inspiring Testing” #esconfs pic.twitter.com/2pTLN99ADm
— Neil Studd (@neilstudd) November 24, 2014
You can read Neil’s experience of the tutorial here.
Day 2 – Tuesday
Day 2 began with some half-day tutorials before the official start of the Conference. The Conference was opened by Chair Paul Gerrard before the first keynote by Prof. Andy Stanford-Clark about “The Internet of Things”. Nick and Kim joined the Conference and got involved.
Kim was involved on the TEST Huddle forum with her thoughts on sessions she attended, in particular Amy Philips talk on working as a tester in the StartUp Community.
Meanwhile Neil was attending Michael Bolton’s half day tutorial titled “What’s The Problem? Delivering Solid Problem Reports” which seemed to be a very interactive session that included a number of mmnemonics for attendees to learn. You can read Neil’s full experience of attending the tutorial here. Neil also wrote a nice post about all the sessions he attended on Day 2 including the sight of five drummers drumming. Read that full review here.
Finally summing up his very first day at a EuroSTAR Conference, Nick presented a brief capsule of what he experience on Day 2 of the Conference with a backing track coming from the Expo Party of Thin Lizzy
Day 3 – Wednesday
After the Community Dinner the previous night at the hallowed halls of Trinity College, day three of EuroSTAR was already upon us. Kim was posting in the TEST Huddle Forum early and had listed her highlights for the day:
By Wednesday, everyone was in EuroSTAR Conference mode. Day three of the Conference was the first day full of tracker sessions. There were alot to choose from. Neil found Alexandru Rotarus’ talk “Changing Mindsets – Learn, Test, Lead [By Example]“ especially insightful and wrote about it here. As well as that he attended a number of other sessions including Isabel Evans’ keynote “Restore to Factory Settings: When A Change Programme Goes Wrong”, tracker sessions by Trude Britt Rosendaal & Gro Rognsta and Nathalie Rooseboom de Vries – van Delf and Julian Harty’s closing keynote of the day on “Software Talks – Are You Listening?”. You can read Neil’s Day Three experiences here.
Meanwhile based in the Expo hall, the TEST Huddle team were giving out some TEST Huddle t-shirts. Also in the Expo hall were the very popular Community Hub and Test Lab. Both had a busy schedule of events for the week including Soap Box sessions and informal talks in the Hub while the Test Lab featured puzzles, guess talks and a whole lot more. You can view one of those Sopabox sessions here:
Day 4 – Thursday
The final day of EuroSTAR Conference 2014. After the excellent Awards ceremony the previous night, there was still a lot to look forward to on Thursday as Kim highlighted:
Neil was out and about on Thursday attending a number of sessions attending that day including the do-over session which was the session that was voted the most popular amongst attendees. The accolade went to Declan O’Riordan’s talk titled “What? Why? Who? How? Of Application Security Testing”. After the Conference closed with the announcement that next year’s venue of Maastricht with the new Chair Ruud Teunissen, there was a trip to the Guinness Storehouse where Neil was still hard at work:
This may be the highest blog I’ve ever written #esconfs pic.twitter.com/sLaCjF5dd9
— Neil Studd (@neilstudd) November 27, 2014
A warm thank you to our Press Pass team Neil Studd, Kim Knup and Nick Shaw. Keep an eye out for the Press Pass Competition for EuroSTAR 2015.
