Friday, July 27, 2018

An Introduction to 2019 Organizers

We find ourselves well into the work towards the European Testing Conference 2019 edition, that will take place in Valencia, Spain on Feb 14-15th. Our Call for Collaboration is open until Aug 19th (give us a chance to get to know *you*), Early Bird Tickets are for sale and all sorts of usual conference buzz is going on.

Who are we then? Who are the people bringing you European Testing Conference 2019? We are all practitioners of software development and testing, running the conference for you as our side project to advance the state of art in testing!

Maaret Pyhäjärvi is a tester and polyglot programmer who recently moved into an Engineering Manager position. No matter the title or activity she works on, it's always about testing in some way. With 25 years of experience in testing and a deep drive to learn more about it, she is the co-founder of European Testing Conference with Adi Bolboaca. She continues to experiment with the conference organizing process with the team. She is in this for improving the world of conferences, and to build practical bridges to testing as we see it - from the perspective of different organizations and roles. She speaks at conferences and scouts for content that need sharing - as a way of connecting with new awesome people.

Franziska (Franzi) Sauerwein is a software crafter working as an Engineering Manager. They're the leading developer in the organizing group, holding up the flag of the areas of testing developers find fascinating. And we've learned so much of those! In addition to being an awesome developer, their focus on collaboration as crafter and understanding of the finer details of how people are included and made feel comfortable makes them a perfect bridge builder. They're active in the SoCraTes community and on the Software Crafters Slack. On top of being all around awesome, Franzi is also sharing lessons as a conference speaker.

Alina Ionescu has been organizing European Testing Conference since it's start and is the heart and mind behind all things visual. In addition to being a brilliant tester who lives and teaches technical testing back and forth, she has a special eye for making everything beautiful. The visuals she creates are wonderful and insightful, and the same happens when collaborating with her. Alina facilitates sessions with the local testing community in her home country Romania, and isn't afraid to step up and share as a speaker / facilitator.

Julia Duran is a second year organizer with a local presence in the country we're visiting in 2019, Spain. She's a test manager with a great vision of what testing is about, keen to always learn more. With this year's conference, it also turns out she is a superb organizer shining our way forward with all the local arrangements we need to learn on as we enter a new country.  With her help, we've learned to sort through new kinds of practices around inclusiveness.

Miroslava Nikolova volunteered for earlier conferences and made an impression as a thoughtful tester and test lead. Her ideas about what makes sense and what people can pick up are invaluable in the process of choosing the right talks for the 2019 edition. She actively brings in the voice of the community, reminds the rest of us on what people say would be of interest and elevates the conference organizing to a new level.

Abigail (Abby) Bangser is a quality consultant turning into a superb observability expert. Her enthusiasm of deep lessons we can share is infectious and she connects pieces of agile, testing and technology is an insightful way. We should have her return as a speaker, as she is awesome at that. But like others amongst the organizers, she has many sides to her and has a superpower of figuring out others and jumping into any task like a fish in the sea.

Marit van Dijk is a software developer with experience in test automation. Her drive for the craft is infectious, and she is making sure it gets distributed well. She's working with open source projects, Cucumber in particular. We are lucky to have her join the organizers team this year, and she's turned out to be the heart and brains of social media communications. While we're happy to organize a conference of our own, we love so much the stuff that others are creating and believe that everyone should have a chance of going to a good conference. Marit delivers that message brilliantly being one of the most connected people and sharing great content online.

We hope to see you at European Testing Conference 2019 in February. We're always up for a good discussion about testing and all things software. This conference comes from a team of practitioners to you - the practitioners. We hope you'll enjoy it as much as we enjoy making it shape.

**any mistakes in the above are sole responsibility of Maaret who decided to write the introductions of people she's delighted to work with on the conference.  

Friday, July 20, 2018

What's special about European Testing Conference

One of the mission statements for ETC is to change the way that conferences are done by leading by example. Here are some of things we do that are different and that we hope to see more conferences adapting as well.
  • Both testers & programmers
    ETC is one of the few conference that looks at testing as both testers and programmers see it. This brings together two communities that often are working on the same team yet see themselves as opposing each other.
  • Diverse and inclusive speakers
    ETC has a very different approach to speakers than most conferences. Having skype calls with *every* potential speaker allows us to find hidden gems and avoid false promising talks. Maaret wrote a blog about it here if you want more info. Also, not only do pay all travel and hotel but we setup a system to pay back immediately, so speakers that are tight on money don't have to go a few months short. This opens us up to many speakers that otherwise wouldn't get to come.
  • Inclusion at the conference
    One of the best parts of a conference is meeting and talking to new people. But this can be hard and intimidating for many of us. We do 3 events at the conference to enable this. (A speed meet, a lean coffee and open space). All of these are full sessions, in the middle of the conference. So that we don't just get the already extroverted people. The timing is also deliberate. Speed Meet right before the 1st lunch so you can find a friend for lunch. Lean coffee (small tables lead by speakers) midway thru the conference so you can discuss what you are learning. Finally open space right near the end, to insure you get that 'one special thing' you really needed from ETC.

Sunday, July 15, 2018

Tickets are available for the 2019 edition!

You don’t want to miss out on the 4th edition of European Testing Conference. The edition is packed with great practical lessons on how we do testing in today’s organizations, and its founded on the deep learning on conference organizing we have from these years. We’ve grown to learn that we are different in how we look at collaboration - we work together in new innovative ways to bring you the best program.
The ticket categories have both a timeframe and a quota on their availability.
  • Super Early Bird Tickets (749 Euros) is available until Mid-September or until 30 people have used the opportunity.
  • Early Bird Tickets (849 Euros) is available until Mid-November or until 40 people have used the opportunity.
  • Regular Tickets (1049 Euros) are available until the conference or until we are full with 200 people.
You may be thinking that our ticket prices are on the higher end, and you are right. That is by design, coming from the fact that we not only pay the speakers travel and hotel, but also share profits with them. This enables us access to very high quality speakers - and you access to high quality learning.
The conference organizers are a group of speakers and practitioning professionals. We take your learning seriously - with a twist of fun to reinforce what we’re learning.
See you at European Testing Conference 2019!
In the spirit of transparency to help you make your choices, here’s a summary of our whole ticket pricing idea. We will have 7 European Diversity Tickets available for free through Travis Foundation. Two of them come with a travel scholarship. We use discount codes available for old speakers to encourage their return, speakers we could not fit into the program this year to encourage them joining, and to particular South-European markets to bring down ticket prices they find preventive. Feel free to get in touch if our communications have not reached you and you are on these groups.

Tuesday, May 8, 2018

Closing European Testing Conference 2018 season

European Testing Conference 2018 took place in Amsterdam, the Netherlands February 19-20th. With just a little over 200 participants, our third year was a both a networking/learning and financial success.

We're a non-profit conference out on a mission to change the world of conferences. This means a few things:
  • Our conference is on testing as different roles in software development overall know it. We love testers. We love developers. We love managers. We love product owners. And testing unites us all - we want to know the quality we are delivering, work on better ways towards feedback and figure out what mix of people would help each of us succeed. 
  • Our speakers are not paying to speak. We guarantee we pay their out of pocket expenses with travel and hotel. They are professionals in the industry, that deserve not only to not pay to speak, but in fact be paid to speak. To manage the risk, we pay our speakers with profit sharing model.
  • Our profits over the years are used to advance the speaker pool introducing underrepresented speakers. Financial reasons keep many great teachers local and with conferences not compensating for the travel, we want to figure out scholarships to support these people. With three years of European Testing Conference under our belt, we have supported three speakers by paying their travel for speaking. 
With 2018 edition of European Testing Conference profit-sharing, we pay:
  • 1917 euros for a keynote speaker (45 min - 5 shares)
  • 383 euros for a track speaker (30-40 min - 1 share)
  • 1534 euros for workshop facilitator (2 sessions, 1.5 hours each - 4 shares)
Every speaker gets paid. Including the few who did their first ever talk and worked hard on fine-tuning their delivery with their mentors support.

We believe this is what conferences need to budget for, and continue our mission to build a conference that gets to the long term target: paying keynotes 5000 euros and track speakers 1000 euros.

We believe great work needs to be paid for. We believe that each of the speakers has spent their lifetime becoming the people they are on stage, teaching us from their experiences and that time is valuable. And we know they spend a lot of effort building the message they deliver.

Our organizer team for 2018 consists of:
In addition, 2017 organizers Aki Salmi (Finland) and co-creator of European Testing Conference Adi Bolboaca (Romania) played a significant part. 

Our organizer team is volunteers and we don't get paid a salary. In fact, we are all working as manager, programmers and testers. Changing the world of conferences in a great company is something we do on the side. 

Saturday, May 5, 2018

Call for Collaboration, ETC 2019

ETC 2019 Call for Collaboration Other conferences call for papers or proposals. We call for collaboration.
TL;DR: Propose an idea or outline for a session. We are selecting based on discussions via Skype/Hangouts. Event: ETC 2019 in Valencia, Spain 14.-15.2.2019. Compensation: Speaker travel expenses guaranteed by the conference. Deadline: Submit by August 19th 2018.

Our conference

European Testing Conference 2019 takes place in Valencia, Spain February 14.15. 2019. The conference travels annually to different locations in Europe.
We are setting up the best practical testing conference that represents testing as different people know it: testers, developers, business analysts and managers. We recognize that testing is continuous, and we want to learn to do its different flavors better through sharing ideas and experiences in spirit of dialog. We seek to understand.

Looking for sessions

To find the right people to share in this conference, we want to collaborate with the existing and emerging speaker communities. We find our professional home communities to be those of agile and context-driven testing, and software craftsmanship, but actively seek to break the walls between them.
We want a good balance of European and non-European speakers and a good balance of craftsmanship and (exploratory) testing backgrounds.
We ask you to collaborate on three types of sessions:
  1. Talks of ideas with practical applicability (30 minutes)
  2. Demos of ideas in use – show and tell (40 minutes)
  3. Workshops of hands-on experiences for participants (90 minutes)
We ask you to collaborate, because we believe the best results come out of working together. We want you to share your topic and excitement, and collaborate before you invest heavily in making the session final as a proposal.
We acknowledge we can’t fit all the great sessions there are. So we want to make it mutually efficient while enabling great content we as organizers would be unaware of. We believe there’s more value out of the collaboration than just our conference talk selection through getting to know one another.
When you respond to the call and we’re considering you, we’ll have a 15-minute Skype/Hangouts session with you to talk about your idea. If you get cut from consideration just for not having space in our talk budget for your type of idea, we’ll let you know by email. We expect the finalized abstract from those who we choose, not as criteria of entry. Timeframe for the discussions is August and September, and this call closes on August 19th.
What we have to offer:
  • entry to participate and present at a great conference in Valencia, Spain 14.-15.2.2019
  • travel expenses and hotel 3 nights reimbursed
  • Profit sharing – we share ½ of the profits with the speakers. You get part of the honorarium pot that translates to money, based on the conference’s financial success and the length of your session
What we expect:
  • Speakers who can stay and participate for the duration of the conference. This is very important to having a great learning environment.
Come. Learn. Do. Teach. Test.

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