The testing community is as vibrant as it has ever been. It is fascinating to see how people put effort in spreading knowledge and organize events that help people to become better versions of themselves in their professional career.
In the past years the AST has established an effective grants programme to support small events, peer conferences and meetups. We believe that helping good people doing good things is beneficial for the testing community.
Maaret Pyhäjärvi contacted us late last year and asked for a grant for her newly founded European Testing Conference. As we started to talk about it, we realized that this does not really fit into our Grant Programme and that our own rules were too limiting to support a non-profit conference with more than 100 participants.
Since we believe that the AST should respond to new inputs and change, we decided to create a new class of activity and start to sponsor other conferences that are in line with the mission of the AST. Yes, of course we think CAST is the greatest conference for software testers, and we also believe that other conferences can be excellent allies in spreading the word about the science and practice of software testing.
In 2016 we have sponsored the European Testing Conference and CopenhagenContext and in the near future the AST will be present at the Test Leadership Congress in April and Australian Testing Days in May. If we decide to sponsor a conference, we ask for exposure at the event because we believe the AST should be out there and talk to people directly.
We are very excited. We will be doing even more this year. We are happy to hear your ideas at “marketing at associationforsoftwaretesting dot org”. Let’s do great things together.
Ilari Henrik Aegerter for the Association for Software Testing
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