What is hot in the testing field?

Had a look at some conferences advertised on the web.

(US testers are lucky – so many software testing events.)

If you are wondering what is hot now – just check the conference programs (or job ads. well, its not the topic of the post..). Test Management, Test Techniques, Metrics, Performance Testing, Reviews & Inspections are more classical topics. And here – some showing the changes in the field: Testing Web Sites/Applications, Test Automation, Automating Test Execution, Exploratory Testing, and Agile Testing...

Seems the first South East European Software Testing Conference SEETEST 2008 will not answer those questions. Although there is a remarkable need to gather testing professionals and interested in Software Software quality to one place. The conference is more concentrated on practical everyday topics in the testers job. Test Design: Specifying Test Cases, Software Testing Essentials, Methodology for structured software testing and an example test strategy – presentations that are more for testing process management. Thus attention to automated testing also is paid: Automated Software Testing, Functional Test Automation Tools: A Practically Minded Comparison, Leveraging Automated Testing in Distributed Environments and other presentations.

EuroSTAR conference on Software Testing Analysis & Review is for European software testing professionals. The theme of EuroSTAR 2008 is “The Future of Software Testing”. Like their welcoming questions about the future of testing:

• Will we still be using the test methods we use today?
• Are we all going Agile?
• Will we use scripted or exploratory testing, or a combination of both?
• Is testing still a separate profession?
• Is testing still a craft or will it be more and more automated?
• What will change in the context of our day-to-day business and how does that affect testing?
• What about training and certification?
• What about our roles: will they stay the same or will they change?
• Will the need for testing diminish? Will testing as a profession eventually disappear? Will technology assist, or make things worse, and how?

So, testing AUTOMATION rules!