Talking testing and test management at EuroSTAR 2017, Copenhagen

The annual EuroSTAR Software Testing Conference is a long running event celebrating the craft of testing in Europe. Four days were jam-packed with over 1000 attendees representing 350 organisations and over 60 sessions including tutorials, workshops, and talks.

It was the first EuroSTAR conference for Adaptavist and we were thrilled to be there to demo Adaptavist Test Management, as well as share Loblaw Digital’s case study. It was presented by Justin Watts on the final morning of the conference.

We had a steady flow of test managers over the three day event, all eager to hear about ATM’s seamless integration with Jira. We spoke to many test managers, QA managers, and test automation engineers across multiple sectors including Telecoms, Banking, Travel, Software, and Retail.

It became apparent that most of the visitors to the Adaptavist Test management stand are in a state of limbo when it comes to updating their testing solution - they know there is a problem with their testing application, but aren’t quite sure what the next step should be. As a result of this, great conversations stemmed from the fact that Adaptavist Test Management is built in Jira, and 95% of attendees were using Jira.

Once we were able to demonstrate that some of our various key features reduce workload, increase productivity, and ensure consistency across tests and executions, our stand was packed with demos being presented to eager guests.

The conference saw a lot of great talks and I personally managed to drop into a number of packed, interesting talks. Here is a rundown of my favourites.

Agile testing – the magic of whole team thinking

Fran O'Hara spoke about the challenges of agile teams and how a whole team-thinking approach can improve collaboration. He explained how effective teams work (transcendent, autonomous, cross-functional) and how to change the way of thinking to lead to success.

Testing A Moving Target: How Do We Test Machine Learning Systems

Peter Varhol spoke about testing being built with the logical foundation that for every given input, there is a defined and unique output. He had us think, "what if software isn’t supposed to behave like that?" This was in relation to machine learning and how adaptive systems are increasingly being used in Ecommerce recommendation engines, predictive analytics, and other daily applications.

Scaled Automation with Adaptavist Test Management

Loblaw Incorporated is Canada’s largest retailer. Loblaw Digital develops its multi-channel experiences across physical and digital channels; including online offerings, e-commerce and loyalty programmes. Justin Watts delivered a talk on how Adaptavist Test Management for Jira enabled his team to scale up, automate, and accelerate agile testing.

His testing team were able to run numerous weekly updates with automated testing, and now have processes that remove bottlenecks as well as help scale their testing. With up to 20 builds happening concurrently, all firing test results back to ATM in real time, they're able to have test results automatically organised and visualised.

The Adaptavist Test Management stand at EuroSTAR 2017

The event was a great experience. It was an excellent opportunity for us to talk to testers and test managers about challenges being faced in their community. We're already looking forward to going back to EuroSTAR in 2018.

Find out how Loblaw Digital increased their testing productivity. Try Adaptavist Test Management for yourself.