Experiment with giving out free tickets for use of your personal networks

European Testing Conference 2017 takes place in Helsinki, Finland on February 8.-10th 2017. Check also our web pages. 

 
We have an amazing conference and amazing pre-conference trainings coming up in February. We'd love to see people join us, and we are realizing that the networks you have outshine the networks we have in passing on the word, and want to invite you into our experiment:

Get a free ticket for yourself (transferrable) for finding five people from your networks to join the conference. 

Get in touch to get a personalized 10 % off the prices discount code and pass the message for people to join European Testing Conference. Your contacts get the discounted tickets with that code, and with five uses of the code, you get your free ticket.

The little epiphany leading to us trying this out is that this is what conferences have been doing forever with closed circles. We want to see if opening this up is something people would be interested in.

We don't ask you to pass our marketing message. We ask you to look at our program, see if you feel you're excited about it and share your own personal excitement in whatever way you choose.

We keep hearing from people that they *did not know* the conference existed. Partner with us to make sure your contacts don't need to feel that way.

From Not Paying to Speak to Timely Payment

European Testing Conference 2017 takes place in Helsinki, Finland on February 8.-10th 2017. Check also our web pages. 

 
It's never been as easy to organize a conference as today. Just decide you do it. If you want to start small, try a single track conference. Find a place that has flexible terms on number of participants  and invoices first part just a little before the conference (easy or hard depending on country). Find speakers to fill your day and attract the crowd. Finally, find people who will pay for the tickets. If you hook on to an existing community, that might be also straightforward.

The thing in particular that makes organizing new conferences easy is the fact that the common expectation for speakers still is that they pay their expenses to come and speak, or at minimum, when you promise to pay the expenses they expect that to happen after the conference. Speakers commonly act as a distributed loan office for the conferences.

The usual sums tossed around in conference budgeting is 700 euros within Europe and 1400 euros when from outside Europe. That's a significant amount of money to bind into someone else's conference for up to 6 months in advance. And surely you need to book on time, otherwise that budget won't be enough.  And you would rather see the conference not pay extra just because you, as a speaker, booked late. 

This is one of the many things  we've set out to do differently for European Testing Conference. Just now, 5 months into the conference, we sent out an expense link to all our recently chosen speakers to encourage them to submit their travel expense compensation claims as they incur. We also opt to coordinate the whole travel from our end with some speakers who don't have even momentarily these kind of assets around to move.


Why is this relevant? Why do we care? The reason is to enable voices that are worth hearing and learning from for you, our audience.  The speakers that would have to choose not to do speaking as finances are hard. We want true diversity, and it means for us that we are working actively to bring down blocks that stop people from sharing the great stuff they have.

Most of seasoned speakers (consulting speakers) are past this already. But they are not the only ones we want to hear from, as awesome as they are. And for them, it might be that a significant part of their assets is tied into payments to expect on expenses of various conferences they're doing. 

Not all of us have a company to back us up and we still have things to say. Asking for different (fairer) treatment seems like something that shouldn't need to happen, when it could be built into the system.

Safety at conferences

European Testing Conference 2017 takes place in Helsinki, Finland on February 8.-10th 2017. Check also our web pages. 

There's an item on the organizers to-do list that did not get done for the 2016 edition a Code of Conduct.

The reason why it is still on the to-do list is twofold. One is that it is easy to believe that this conference will reflect the values of its organizers. Another is that instead of copying a common code of conduct, we feel we have special needs. 

The code of conduct we want could be summed up as Don't be a jerk. We would like everyone to feel safe and included. And we recognize that with a special mix of testers and developers, and our history of separation it is easy to make someone not feel safe. We will have differences of backgrounds and opinions. We hope to work on those in spirit of dialog and aim of understanding the other over winning an argument. 

Testers say things that offend developers. "Developers can't be trusted with testing". "What developers do is only checking". And Developers say things that offend testers "You're not needed unless you become programmers too". "Why didn't you find that bug, testing is your responsibility".

We want to start this conference from the premise that we are all valuable. Testing is too important to be left only for testers - it's everyone's business. We need diverse views to make feedback make more sense in the world of software development. 

When there is any reason to feel unsafe at European Testing Conference, we hope people would approach us and we're committed to take things seriously. And we recognize that even we are not immune to offending people with out actions even with a good intent. 

We have work to do on this one. Creating a safe learning space is something we all do together. 

Testing is important is a given

European Testing Conference 2017 takes place in Helsinki, Finland on February 8.-10th 2017. Check also our web pages.

When we started European Testing Conference, two things were very clear to us in the vision:

• Our focus is practical - "getting experts and practitioners together to talk, learn and practice the art of testing" and "We’re tired of conferences that feel more like sales pitches than practitioners sharing the craft"
• We're about testing, not testers - "we bring together testing from developer and tester perspectives in a practice-oriented package in a dialog culture, aiming for mutual learning of how testing can be done in practice"

With the collaboration calls with our potential speakers, what this means in practice has been shaped for clarify. We're not selecting talks that explains what testing / tester is and isn't. We're selecting examples of what testing looks like. What would be the practical things people have done and want to teach others. From people in different locations, organizations, and different roles. From voices old and new.

With every collaboration call, we've been looking for the practical core to every view that the amazing potential speakers have proposed us. We've learned that sometimes the practical stories are hidden under abstractions. Sometimes people want to talk about a big thing in a short time, when a subset of the big thing is of the best practical value to us.

In this conference, we take it as a given that testing is important. Testing is needed. And we respect the variety of ways to organize for it, and learn from each other in the spirit of dialog.

Super-Early Bird Tickets are available until end of August (timezone: whole world). And Early Bird Tickets after that. 

Join us to learn on testing from peers. The organizers and speakers are approachable and everyone wants to share both in sessions and on hallways. Be there to take your learnings back to the work we do.

It's all about people

European Testing Conference 2017 takes place in Helsinki, Finland on February 8.-10th 2017. Check also our web pages. 

We've had a lovely time setting things up for European Testing Conference 2017. In the spirit of experimenting all kinds of new things that we believe would take things forward, this upcoming year sees two major changes.

Collaboration with speakers has a new meaning

Usually, when you submit to a conference, there's a program committee with a group of reviewers who carefully read what you've written. They ask you to label your proposal, describe it as you'd describe it for people you want to join your session, and describe it as giving a little more detail on understanding what you'll actually do. They ask you about you, your work experience and your speaking experience.

We asked too, but the detail in how you write when you propose a session with us isn't the basis we use on choosing. We talk with every single one of our submitters - as long as they schedule the Skype talk from a vast variety of times we've made available.

Our call for collaboration is still open until August 21st. But we've already started discussions to learn about who these people are and what their topics are about.

For each of the calls, there's a feeling of being honored to meet face-to-face over Skype wonderful testers, developers, analysts and managers all around the world. Each one has unique experiences, and the excitement to their topics shines through. Some receive feedback on trying to fit too much into a talk and we talk about how they feel about adapting the talk. Some receive feedback on the fact that many people talk on similar topics, and the choice of which one will fit is going to be a hard one.

For each of the calls, it's not just the applicability for this conference we're concerned for. We want to help these people find the places that are right for them to share the passion they clearly have. We want to help these people find help to grow as speakers if that is what they need.

Each call emphasizes the belief I couldn't quite phrase earlier: it's all about people. We have the need of connecting, sharing, and building our ideas forward in dialog that crosses borders of roles in software development. We know testing is important, we want to know how to learn to do it better!

The three ways of connecting at the conference

We have created a conference outline, like a budget of time allocated for different kind of sessions. We're in the process of publishing that on our web page.

We loved the people connecting element last year. In one of the collaboration calls, we learned that last years connections taught about what people really know on a topic and how that could be taught better, and created a pairing relationship between a tester and a programmer to bring even more awesome sessions for this next conference or other conferences out there. We want to see people get creative together, to work out together, to cross comfort zones in a safe environment.

Our program will keep the two conference-wide sessions that don't have a prescheduled agenda:

• Lean Coffee discussion in the middle of the conference allows people to bring out questions, ideas and experiences in a variety that no single presenter is able to do. Lean coffee has little to do with coffee, it's just time-boxed discussion around topics of the group, one topic at a time until the group feels it is time to move on. 
• Open Space is the possibility to share the stuff you have to share, whether you're a participant, or a speaker-participant. Announce a session in one of our locations, and people who are into your topic will join you. Law of two feet allows people to move where they feel they are learning or contributing. 

We are adding a third session with a social nature. For lack of better word, we call it speed meeting. This is a conference where no one needs to be alone. We start with finding things we connect in, sharing little insights. 

There's still formal contents

If all this social makes you feel awkward, don't worry. Most of our days are still filled with great conference program. We have 30 minute talks from experts around the world. We have 45 minute demo talks, to show applying something in practice. And we have 90 minute workshops for you to get to try stuff. 

Join us, we believe the event that is this much fun to organize will be fun to participate. Learning new things is fun. 

Super-Early Bird Tickets for European Testing Conference 2017

European Testing Conference 2017 brings together the software craftmanship and tester viewpoints to testing in lovely Helsinki, Finland 9.-10.2.2017. Super-Early Bird tickets are available for three more weeks for the price of 496 euros (incl. VAT), get yours by end of August!

Tickets available from our web shop, also with an invoice!

With this message, we are proud to announce our keynote speakers:

• Fiona Charles brings in deep, long-term understanding of testing as testers/test managers know it.
• Kevlin Henney represents the developer perspective to testing.
• Gitte Klitgaard is our inspirational speaker, helping us all be brave at work and while learning through practice.
• Nicola Sedgwick shares from personal experiences with a voice that has not been heard enough yet while should be.  

We’re building the program, and the full program will be available mid September. Personal discussions with everyone who submits are ongoing to select you the best practical contents at delivery, and submissions close on August 21st.

Before the conference, there is a separate training day 8.2.2017 with 5 options, for 496 euros separately, or together with the conference for 930 euros total.

More information on the conference is available on our web site.

This conference is brought to you by the organizers Maaret, Adi, Llewellyn, Aki, Alina and Simon - 3 testers, 3 programmers to build a balanced program worth attending!

ETC 2017 Call for Collaboration

Other conferences call for papers or proposals. We call for collaboration.

TL;DR:  Propose a talk without necessarily finalizing the abstract. Defer event-specific work through collaboration (talk on Skype/Hangouts) to only happen when selected.
Event: ETC 2017 in Helsinki, Finland 9.-10-2-2017.
Compensation: Speaker travel expenses guaranteed by the conference.
Deadline:  Submit by August 21^st. 

Submit. 

Our conference

European Testing Conference 2017 takes place in Helsinki, Finland February 9-10^th 2017. 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. We recognize that testing is continuous, and we want to learn to do it’s 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 we’ve built up between the communities.

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 (45 minutes)
3. Workshops of hands-on experiences for participants (90 minutes)

We ask you to collaborate, because we believe there are two types of sessions we could get.

“Best of”

The first category is solid sessions that awe people in other conferences already. Our audience has not seen them, and we might not be aware of them. Tell us!

“New Sessions”

The second category is sessions that could emerge when there is the right stage. Most proposals conference speakers work hard on will be in this category. 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, yet 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 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 21^st.

What we have to offer:

• entry to participate and present at a great conference in Helsinki, Finland 9.-10.2.2017
• travel expenses and hotel 3 nights reimbursed
• Profit sharing – we share ½ of the profits with the speakers. You get a share into honorarium pot (1 share for talks/demos, 2 shares for workshops) that translates to money based on the conference’s financial success

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.

Submit now. 

Calling for a Keynote!

Many (most) conference fill in the keynote slots with regular faces as keynote speakers. As an organizer, who is a speaker and a starting keynoter, Maaret Pyhäjärvi is driving a new style for one of the European Testing Conference 2017 keynotes.

We have invited three of our four keynotes, and the fourth one is now open for a call to keynote for  European Testing Conference 2017 in Helsinki, Finland on Feb 8.-10th 2017.

There are people out there who know they would do great on a keynote. They are strong presenters with experience, and a message that needs to get heard. As conference organizers, we can't know who they are, and without a public call, we will choose only amongst people we know of.

This is a conference on testing as developers and testers and business analysts know it. Your talk could be anything you think is appropriate for this mixed audience with interest in testing.

For selection, the final call is on the organizers. To work on our understanding, however, we team up with our advisors to ask for their perceptions.

In this call, we ask you to announce yourself and your topic(s), provide a video reference if you have one of you speaking. If your don't have one, you can either create one or do a sample piece with us over Skype.

You have until end of June to let us know of your existence, we select the keynoter in July.

If you feel like coaching would help you with final delivery, don't let that stop you. There's people we can direct you to for help.

What we offer:

• We pay travel + stay for all our speakers for three nights. Conference entry is free. And we have a speaker's dinner on Feb 8th 2017, just before the conference.
• Keynoters get 5 shares into our speaker profit sharing model. In 2016 it meant being paid 800 euros. 
• Keynoters get to amp up their income by delivering a one-day training where half of the profit is theirs (that is on Feb 8th)

What we require:

• You want to stay for the whole conference and not just show up to deliver a talk

We'd love to see a new keynoting voice emerge!

Call for Keynotes is here.

Added note: this is not a women-only call but a new keynoters building up their reputation call. Gender is not a selection criteria in any way here. 

Our 2016 compensation model

We're happy to announce that we have finalized the details of our Speaker compensation model 2016 edition. That is, we know we made some profit. We have shared the rules of how we share the profit with our speakers. And we're organizing for the details of the compensation to take place.

Our model is based on shares. As a speaker of European Testing Conference, you get shares. If we barely break through or even end up on the negative, all the speaker gets is their expenses paid - that is the minimum. But if we make a profit, we share it according to the shares.

A keynote speaker gets five shares. A regular session speaker gets one share. A workshop session gets 2 shares. And organizing for the whole year gets you four shares. In 2016, a share was worth 160 euros.

We offer our speakers three ways to take the money:

1. Invoice it
2. Take a ticket for 2017. Use self, or pass on. 
3. Leave it for our secondary idealistic goal: scholarships for new speakers for conferences that don't pay the travel costs. 

We already know that from the support of our speakers, we will be launching an experiment with SpeakEasy and a conference to enable a new speaker traveling to conference to speak without paying for the travel costs themselves. 

We do this to change the world of conferences.

Stay tuned for early June for our Call for Collaboration on how you could become part of the 2017 experience! 

Search for people of 2017 begins!

European Testing Conference 2016 was a blast, and we'll get back to sharing the feedback, the financial report and video content as those come together. But we already have a new year in the making as our thoughts are on European Testing Conference 2017 in Helsinki, Finland.

As before, we will be looking for you to join in various roles: we'd love to see you become a participant and create the wonderful atmosphere we could enjoy in 2016. We welcome you as an organizer joining our ranks and taking the conference to new heights. If organizing is a little too much, become an advisor and have discussions with us on what the content should be and how we should approach the conference in general. And we're right about now starting the search for speakers. There will be a call for co-creation to ask for you to get in touch, but co-creation is really an ongoing process. Get in touch so that we know of you.

There was a great blog post in synch with this conferences values  today. We picked up a few ideas from it:

• We need to do Lift Pitch Online - the 5 minute pitch for your practical sessions to make selection more interactive. And true to Maaret's Speak Easy appreciation, this is not a one-off, but should you feel you want to improve on feedback, you'll get to try again. Skype is great for this. 
• We need to assess if we could introduce a model of free tickets for upcoming year for conference speakers, at least ones that identify as new to sharing in public. I know I hear nothing until I've delivered my talk, and would love to enable the year of full participation. 

We also know better than before how we'd describe what we seek in sessions: 

• We seek focused ideas that inspire to action
• We seek practical sessions that show how things are done. A demo or an experience over a talk. 
• We seek people who speak to meet people and want to be around the whole conference. 

There was one particular discussion I had with many of our 2016 speakers on the conference working towards not paying to speak. When I shared the news that we will be paying honorariums already this year, every speaker said they don't do this for money. They are happy with the expenses covered. Sometimes they even feel they would pay to meet the other speakers and get in the in-circle, and to get the stage to meet all the wonderful participants. My point is only: this is work, even if it is fun work. Opportunity cost matters: with all time you could be doing something else. If you can be paid, wouldn't that be great even if not a must-have? If you would choose over two otherwise similar audiences but one pays and the other doesn't, wouldn't that matter to you in your selection? 

Let's talk about t-shirts

There's probably very few topics while organizing this conference we've had as much discussion and wonder as on a seemingly simple task of t-shirts. Since we use this blog to share stuff conference organizing around European Testing Conference teaches us, this a must share lesson.

Have you even been to a conference that hands out shirts, where all the shirts are same model but just different sizes? There's a concept of "unisex" shirt, which basically means that everyone gets to wear a t-shirt designed for men.

I've received during my career probably about 100 conference / event shirts, and very few of them stick. The fact that they are men's shirts has always meant that I pick up one, and give it as a souvenir to one of my relatives, or enjoy the cleaning opportunities with a new rag. Out of these shirts, there's two I have used at or after the conference: the TestBash t-shirt (fitted for women!) and the fitted long-sleeved shirt one of my employers got me that was my absolute favorite for a long time.

Think of it this way. If you are a man and arrive at European Testing Conference next week, how happy you'd be when we hand you a women's fitted model? We thought you wouldn't be, so we've been using a lot of time on back and forth on trying to think what we'd like to give as choice for people.

Last year at Agile 2016, this whole issue of t-shirts became very clear to me. I was given a "women's shirt", that was that only by a name. The poor conference organizers were puzzled on the discussion, after all their t-shirt vendor had told them the model they had was women's. It was only smaller in sizing, not fitted as a women's shirt would be. With European Testing Conference, we heard exactly the same with t-shirt vendors, and going around to find just the right model is actually a lot of work.  It's so easy to get the wrong one even if you tried.

Not everyone, regardless of gender will ever care about the t-shirt. We ended up with different image designs for the men's and women's, and some feel strongly that wouldn't be right either. But let's say it this way: I'd rather not have a graphic element on both sides of my chest, that works in men's but not so much on women's version.

Conference t-shirt is a successful investment if people wear it after the conference, and it starts good discussions that perhaps lead to people discovering the conference. We'll see how this works out, but it surely is an experiment that takes a bit of effort where everyone is an expert on people they've been in touch with. Now, fingers crossed our shirts arrive in time, and we don't have to ship them around after the conference.

Do you know Altom?

Organizations really are defined through a group of people. They recruit people that fit and form a culture. And the organization I want to introduce is very special in this sense.

Altom (@altomsays) is a company based in Romania, with a subsidiary in Finland. Altom is one of the Gold sponsors of European Testing Conference. Even though I sincerely hope they get they money's worth in sponsoring us, I also believe they are in this to support a cause of skilled testing.

This post is not part of our sponsoring agreement, but emerges from my need of introducing a group of people. If you ever have a chance of meeting people under the Altom flag and your experience is anything like mine, you will find people that are:

• Seeing the big picture of testing, capable of management, testing, and automation in a smart, practical way
• Willing to share what they know to change the world of testing
• Fun to hang out with, insightful and caring

My first experiences with Altom-ese were from Finland. Organizing local testing community events, I got in touch with people who volunteered to help, and delivered on every promise. And not long, they were doing things I has secretly hoped that would happen in Finland, like bringing international testing stars like Michael Bolton and James Bach to deliver us trainings. I took my RST with Michael through Altom.

Skilled testing is their thing. In addition to enabling RST in Finland and Romania, Altom-ese are deeply involved in communities like Tabara de Testare, the Romanian Testing Community. And in recent years, they have been taking action in enabling international online training on Cem Kaner's Black-Box Software Testing course series, the next generation.  For the BBST commercial series, they do important work on making sure that creating and maintaining the course to help it improve further is financially sustainable.

Altom will be there with us in Bucharest 11.-12th. They are happy to talk about what they do as a company, but being the awesome individuals they are, they are always happy to discuss anything. I hope we have a chance of introducing you all to them.  They are also a worth-to-follow on twitter, sharing very nice insightful articles from their own people's experiences as well as mining what is relevant out there.

A master of Mobile: Julian Harty

We have so many amazing people to introduce to you for European Testing Conference 2016 that it is making it hard for us to decide the order in which to share our excitement. So we're picking a second track speaker: Julian Harty.

If you don't know who Julian Harty is, do a google search. You will find he is a very popular keynoter on major testing conferences, and a master of all things mobile. If there's anything around mobile testing (or development for that matter), Julian is one of the go-to-people. His materials online are one of the go-to-sources. 

In addition to being absolutely brilliant in the stuff he shares in his talks, he is also - quoting a friend of mine - "one of the nicest people you can run into in the testing circles". We gave him 30 minute track slot, not a keynote. But we also give him - and all of you - the whole conference for conferring, and in particular open space to create sessions on anything we missed on the scheduled program. Julian is one of the people who will have more stuff to share than we can fit into the two days, and willingness to share it and learn more with everyone of you.

Julian's scheduled session is titled The Symbiosis of Mobile Analytics and Testing. Knowing what this stuff is about, I would say that while mobile focused with mobile insights, there's a lot in this for anyone who has not yet had the fortune of moving over to experience mobile. 

There's still a few more weeks to get your ticket and join us. Don't miss out! 

One future of testing and testers from a context of Jesse Alford

There were rumors before, but at Agile 2015 in Washington DC, Elisabeth Hendrickson added a bit to spark my curiosity. Elisabeth is a manager at Pivotal Cloud Foundry, with a few hundred engineers but only two exploratory testers.

In the field of testing, the discussion of tester role, its modern transformations and the future of anyone who identifies themselves as testers is unavoidable. While with European Testing Conference we want to believe that the world of software needs all of our contributions, looking into options and possibilities of personal growth is always encouraged.

With the conference in Feb 11-12th in the lovely city of Bucharest, we're very pleased to offer you a chance of looking into one particularly enchanting context of testing through the eyes of Jesse Alford. Jesse delivers a talk on Everybody Tests: Balanced Teams, Extreme Programming and Exploration. Jesse is one of the two explorers Pivotal Cloud Foundry has.

Jesse Alford travels from San Fransisco, USA to share his lessons, and his presence in Europe might be a rare treat or an opening of opportunities to connect. I’ve been most puzzled with the company that has 200 developers but only 2 testers - or explorers as they call them. How does it really work? What is an explorer, and how would you expect a person recruited to that role to be? When everyone tests, what is left for these rare specialists? What does Jesse mean when he writes that he helps people by learning things?

In addition to delivering his talk, Jesse (just like all our speakers) will be around enabling us to dig deeper into interesting subjects. Will you be there to share with us?

Introducing European Testing Conference

The very first European Testing Conference takes place in about a month! You still have a chance to get your ticket and join us this year. With this blog, however, we want to open up a bit more of the ideas and inspirations that have lead us to the conference.

This conference started with a twitter discussion of three people, who have met each other over conferencing: Maaret Pyhäjärvi, Adi Bolboaca and Aki Salmi. The conferences that tend to bring us together are often labeled 'agile'. We wanted one where we could extend the label 'agile' with 'testing' as we knew it from different perspectives: developers, testers, analysts, managers alike.

As the discussion started, we quickly learned there was a lot of common ground in what we wanted to create:

• A "from community, to community" event that would share and take forward practical aspects of testing
• Focus on co-creating with speakers over selection from blindly created samples of talks 
• Balance of testing as testers know it (exploration, as performance) and as developers know it (automation, as artifact creation) and heavy cross-pollination of people of different backgrounds: testing as feedback, something that is too important to be left just for testers but where deep skills in testing are beneficial
• A conference that was fair to speakers: not making them pay for speaking (enabling a whole bunch of people to speak that we see too rarely) and even paying them for speaking (enabling the best speakers to join)
• Avoiding debate and focus on dialogue and mutual learning. We can agree to disagree, but understanding others with different experiences is important
• A traveling conference (different locations every year) with focus on Europe

We're very happy to see the light of day for the 1st release of this conference on Feb 11-12th in Bucharest, Romania.

We believe we are unique in the world of testing conferences. We look up to other conferences that are fair to speakers such as #TestBash run by the wonderful Rosie Sherry in the UK that also have brilliant content. We recognize there are a lot of wonderful options for testing conferences, and aim to create one that truly would bring together testing and software craftmanship communities on themes of testing - a rare mix for now.

Our end result has 26 speakers with scheduled slots with very interesting contents - you'll  hear more about our excitement on speakers in upcoming posts. In addition to scheduled slots, we have reserved time and space for emergent topics. There's so much knowledge there waiting to be shared that we find that Open Space and Lean Coffee is a must.

Will we see you in a month in Bucharest? Follow us on twitter: @EuroTestingConf #EuroTestConf and get in touch. We'd love to hear from you!