I'll be facilitating a tutorial at EuroSTAR 2026

This post was published on January 9, 2026

One of the decisions I made early last year was to pretty much stop contributing to conferences abroad. I’m not going to revisit my reasons for that decision here, if you’re interested in them, you can read the blog post I just linked to.

In that blog post, I did list a couple of exceptions, though, and one of those was when a conference is held in a country that I really want to go to, either for personal or for professional reasons. The list of countries that rule applies to is short, but Norway is on it, so when I heard that EuroSTAR 2026 -probably the largest software testing conference in Europe- was going to be held in Oslo, I knew I wanted to at least submit a proposal and see if I could get myself on the programme.

Now, when given the choice, I strongly prefer running a tutorial over doing a presentation, so the decision on what kind of session to submit was an easy one. The first day of EuroSTAR typically is tutorial day, so there’s a few slots for tutorials available.

I decided to submit a tutorial around Playwright, as last year has shown me that there is a lot of demand for Playwright knowledge and experience, which would increase my chances of making it to the programme. I didn’t just want to make it an ‘Introduction to Playwright’ tutorial, though, as I don’t think that would really stand out from the other submissions.

So, the choice was a fairly straightforward one, and I decided on submitting a slightly modified version of my ‘Improving your Playwright code’ workshop, and I’m happy to say that it got accepted.

In this tutorial, I’d like to go beyond just teaching Playwright, although, of course, the tool will play an important role. What I’ll be doing in the tutorial is I’ll present participants with a Playwright code base for some end-to-end tests on a fictional application.

We’ll then start by reviewing this code to identify areas for improvement. I’ll then ask participants to advocate for the improvements. That is, don’t just say ‘we should do this’, but also explain why we want to do this (an important skill that is too often forgotten). Of course, there will be plenty of time to get hands-on and actually apply the improvements.

What the tutorial will look like exactly is still work in progress, but what you’re reading just now is general gist of it. More details about the contents of the tutorial can be found on the EuroSTAR conference page for this session.

In any case, I’m really, really looking forward to my visit to Oslo and to EuroSTAR 2026. I hope to see you there!

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