The first UKSTAR Testing Conference comes to London on 27 and 28 February. Bringing together London’s Testing, Development and Technology Management communities, UKSTAR will overlook Westminster Bridge and the Thames from County Hall. Our theme for 2017 is ‘Bridges over Barriers’.
The water flowing under Westminster Bridge is a barrier that has divided the land since the end of the last ice age. Before bridges were built the only way for Belgic tribes and Anglo-Saxon kingdoms on the North and South banks to communicate was to use a boat or get wet.
Today London has a highly advanced economy made possible by 33 physical bridges across the Thames, from Teddington Lock to the open sea, and superb connectivity with the UK and the rest of the world. Although some buildings are retained as historic monuments, nothing else stands still for long. Every square metre is used, adapted, reinvented, and revalued. The UK is an ideas leading nation and those ideas need communicating to be adopted. Our trade is rapidly transitioning from conventional testing tasks and tools into highly dynamic DevOps pipelines, and now with increased Security concerns, into SecDevOps, with radical new roles, tools and techniques. If you’re part of that transition, we want to hear from you!
UKSTAR invites anyone with great Testing ideas and stories to submit your concepts and opinions (by 25th October). UKSTAR wants world-class speakers, especially those that don’t traditionally speak at Testing Conferences such as Developers, Product Owners, and novices who only recently started public speaking. If you have faced barriers and overcome them, or failed valiantly, tell us about it. If you have an exceptional Testing story, tell us! We want you to build bridges. We want you to be a UKSTAR!
To submit to speak, simply fill out the form, telling us a bit about yourself and the talk you’d like to give. The talks at UKSTAR will be 20-25 minutes long, with 5-10 minutes for Q&A. We want to encourage as many styles, stories and subjects as possible. Some tracks will have specific practical tips, others may propose challenging new perspectives or ideas. Some sessions will be presentation-style, others will be audience participation style.
We will also have a new type of presentation at UKSTAR, that we are calling “Conversation” tracks. These will be two speakers, talking for 10 – 15 minutes, followed by a moderated discussion between speakers and audience. A conversation track is 60 minutes long. If you’d like to be part of a conversational track, we invite you to submit a talk of 10 – 15 minutes. We will pick pairs of speakers with enough common ground to easily understand each other’s decisions, and enough difference to learn from each other’s choices. We don’t expect the conversations to be a debate, rather a way of understanding different points of view. We will look for pairs of speakers who do similar work in different contexts, who use different tools to achieve parallel aims, who have similar problems but alternative solutions. Two people may submit together for a conversation track, but you don’t have to have a conversation partner in order to submit.
You’ll know, shortly before we release the program, who will be your partner in the conversation. We’ll try to find pairings with a good chance of mutual respect, and we hope that you’ll find each other interesting. You won’t need to meet or rehearse before the event – we hope that the unscripted element of each session will be natural and spontaneous.
So, we hope that you will be as excited as we are about UKSTAR in London in February 2017, and we look forward to seeing the ideas you will put forward in your submissions!
Dorothy Graham, James Lyndsay and Declan O’Riordan
(UKSTAR Organising Committee)
Deadline for receipt of Submissions is Tuesday, 25th October 2016