Testival 2025, Zabok, Croatia

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Open Space

Testival is one of the rare open space conferences. Its format is highly influenced by CITCON. The only difference from CITCON is that Testival usually has an opening keynote talk. Most conferences follow a predetermined schedule with talks and speakers announced in advance. The more open space conferences I attend, the more I like the format.

Friday

Most participants were not familiar with the open space conference, so the event started by organizers explaining the format.

The conference continued with introductions. Everybody said a sentence or two about them. There were about fifty participants, so that part didn’t last long.

The main part of the first day was participants suggesting topics for sessions the next day. It started slow. Much slower than I expected. But, very slowly, people were suggesting interesting topics. After about an hour, we had more topics than we could possibly discuss on Saturday. Next, we voted on the topics. The topics that got the most votes were scheduled in four parallel tracks. The more votes a topic got, the bigger room it was scheduled in.

I have suggested two topics, but they didn’t get enough votes to be scheduled.

After the voting, the social part of the day started. Food and drinks were served and I had a nice time talking with people. In my opinion, that’s a very important part of a conference.

Saturday

Saturday started with breakfast and social time. It’s always nice to have plenty of time to socialize at conferences.

The keynote was Back to the Future: Quality Engineering Edition by Irja Straus.

In general, I’m against having a keynote at an open space conference. Every time we talk about organizing the next Testival, I get outvoted. Other Testival organizers like keynotes. Most years we had only one keynote at the start of the second day of the conference. Some years we had two keynotes, at the start and at the end of the second day.

Irja is an experienced conference and meetup speaker. I have seen her talk before and I knew she can give a good keynote. She lived up to my expectations. The keynote was about the current state of software testing mixed up with a lot of Back to the Future references, quotes, photos and clips. It was informative and fun. I was impressed. Irja did a great job.

The main part of the conference was after the keynote. Unfortunately, life happened, so I had to leave immediately after the keynote.

I have heard it was a great conference. I hope the next time I’ll be able to participate in the entire event.

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