EuroSTAR 2008

EuroSTAR 2008 in The Hague was a great success. Thank you to all of you who attended our action packed week in The World Forum Convention Center. We had a huge number of attendees participate and look forward to meeting many of you again in Sweden at EuroSTAR 2009.A special thanks also to Bob van de Burgt and his programme team who created an inspirational programme which was very well recieved.

Check out The EuroSTAR Community Blog for some links to other blogs containing thoughts on EuroSTAR 2008.

The Programme Chair for 2009 was announced at the closing session of EuroSTAR 2008- The EuroSTAR team would like to welcome Dorothy Graham to the post and we look forward to working with her throughout the year. Dorothy was the Programme Chair of the first EuroSTAR conference in 1993 and with her years of experience we can guarantee EuroSTAR 2009 will be an event not to be missed.

On Thursday 13th November the 2008 Gala Awards Evening was held in the magical Grote Kerk. We would like to congratulate the winners of awards:

• Testing Excellence Award: Geoff Thompson, Experimentus Ltd., UK
• Sogeti Cup for Best Paper: Bert Jagers, CTG, Belgium
• Capgemini Award for Innovation: Michael Bolton, DevelopSense, Canada
• Logica Rising Star Award: Elise Greveraars, Atos Origin, The Netherlands

The EuroSTAR exhibition is now the largest showcase of test tools and services in Europe with almost 50 companies participating as either sponsors or exhibitors at EuroSTAR 2008 in the Netherlands.

Final Words From The EuroSTAR 2008 Programme Chair
by Bob van de Burgt

Three weeks after EuroSTAR 2008 I'm still amazed that after almost a year of preparation, the conference went by like a flash. Beginning with the arrival of the tutorial speakers and ending with the always-exciting Gala Awards Dinner. The time between those two events seems like a blur, so I welcome the opportunity to reflect on this year's conference as I write to you about the recent past, as well as look to the future.

First of all I want to thank all who attended the conference, the delegates, the speakers, the track chairs, the sponsors and the exhibiters.
I was overwhelmed with 422 submissions from 25 countries. I would like to thank all members of the review committee for scoring all the proposals and the programme committee members, John Fodeh, Graham Thomas and Iris Pinkster for their help in creating the programme and all their help during the conference. They did a great job!
I also want to thank all keynote speakers and track speakers for being "discussion enablers" this year, where we were headed for the future.

Isabel Evans and Dorothy Graham did a great job with the manifesto workshops in bringing these discussions together to create a first draft of the software testing manifesto. Some pictures of the workshops are already on the website www.softwaretestingmanifesto.org and the results of the workshops will be added soon. This is only the start of the Future of Software Testing. The lively discussions can continue on the website and everybody can contribute.

Last but certainly not least, I want to thank the Qualtech Team for giving me this opportunity and managing the whole process. It was great working with them and I'm really going to miss them.
Thank you all for making EuroSTAR 2008 such a great conference!

EuroSTAR 2009 will be chaired by Dorothy Graham. I'm confident that she will create an excellent conference and I'm already looking forward to it. Good luck to Dorothy and her team.

I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year and I hope to see you all next year in Stockholm!

Thanks again,

Bob van de Burgt