EuroSTAR Testing Voices 2021

In June of 2021, EuroSTAR ran a free online event. Having either Maaret Pyhäjärvi and Keith Klain on the program would have been enough to add this to my calendar; having both got me there.

Maaret Pyhäjärvi: Testing Becoming Harder to be Valuable

As usual, Maaret sees a bright and exciting future for her role that I have trouble reconciling with my reality. In Maaret's vision, crowdsourced testers find the obvious bugs. She's left to skim the cream off the milk, performing the interesting, thoughtful work of understanding a complex system. She and her fellow testers are not repositories for or regurgitators of information. They share testing ideas before they become results or automated tests, with the goal of making others more productive. They tell compelling stories of the unseen: bugs that never happened, testing they never performed.

Dream big Maaret.

Panel: Different Teams, Different Testers

Veerle Verhagen hosted this panel. If you're feeling a bit exhausted, I can recommend a small dose of Veerle directly to your brain. These were my top three takeaways:

• The best way to skill up automation is to do it on the job.
• You can give assignments back.
• Raise problems even if they're outside the current scope.

Keith Klain: Test as Transformation

Keith speaks from a position of connecting testing to the business strategy, which is exactly what he recommends we all do. Talk the talk of driving innovation and managing risk to get people's attention and connect what you're doing to the money. Writing a pile of cheap flaky checks (or even consistently passing ones!) may give you a false sense of security that hides the bigger risks. Strive to gather more information to soundly evaluate the risks in your products, enough to understand what would have happened if you hadn't caught it and how to prevent something similar in the future.

Thanks to the EuroSTAR team for pulling this together and (not charging for it).