The main theme of the conference was "Diversity, Innovation, Leadership". Testing professionals came to speak, discuss, participate in workshops, and engage in social activities—all related to software testing and quality. The first 1.5 days were dedicated to workshops, while the rest of the conference was comprised of 2.5 days of keynotes and talks.
The EXPO area hosted one of the most popular attractions: The Test Lab. Here, everyone could try solving different kinds of games and puzzles to win swag. Back to back with the Test Lab was the Community Hub where people would meet and discuss anything related to testing. The Hub included a soap box area where industry veterans were giving short talks. This was taking place all through the conference.
EuroSTAR is an awesome conference for anyone interested in testing. People from many different industries attend, and if you engage in the social activities you can really get some perspective and feedback on your own work. The atmosphere is friendly and everyone is excited to share and help others improve and succeed.
As I mentioned initially, I was attending EuroSTAR to give a talk about The Toolsmiths, one of our QA teams. Unity QA has changed a bit since Thomas wrote about our organization 2.5 years ago (part 1, part 2). At Unity, automation is not a goal, it’s a tool. We aim to automate checks that should be performed by computers, and have humans do actual testing. Developers, SDETs, and Toolsmiths focus on the former, while STEs and student workers focus on the latter.
The Toolsmiths team is a branch from the SDET team that happened back in 2012, and we cover the middle ground between development and testing. Where SDETs focus on product automation, Toolsmiths focus on tools, frameworks, infrastructure, examples, documentation, and evangelization (teaching developers and testers how to use tools and automation to become more productive).
Some of the things we've been working on lately include:
It was awesome to attend EuroSTAR 2014 and talk to the testing community about who we are, what we do, and how we do it. Unity QA will definitely be attending other conferences, including Eurostar 2015 in Maastricth, and hopefully speaking again soon.
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