Maik Nogens and myself are organizing the German Agile Testing and Exloratory (GATE) Workshop. We are proud to announce the call for contributions for this workshop. It will be held in Hamburg, Germany on October 1st 2011.

GATE will be a low budget, non-profit peer workshop. This means that we might split expenses for the location and commodities equally among the participants (probably below € 100). Every participant will take care of the remaining costs for her- or himself, e.g. travel, lunch.

As the main goal we identified the following elevator pitch:

For ambitioned testers who want to learn established approaches and practices in the craft of software testing the GATE workshop provides a platform for an equal knowledge exchange. In contrast to traditional conference formats the GATE workshop provides a practical, low budget, controversial experience on software testing.

That said, we are interested in contributions such as

• realistic experience reports
• controversial testing techniques
• testing in practice (Testing Dojos, Hands-on testing)
• options for distributed software testing

Feel free to contact us if you are unsure. We will be most glad to provide you feedback.

The language of the workshop will be dependent on the workshop participants. It might be German all day, but if we got international contribution, we might decide to hold the workshop in English.

If you want to attend the first German Agile Testing and Exploratory Workshop, come up with a contribution, and send it to us until September 5th. Further details on the attendees, the program, and travel information will be provided later.

If you are interested in the format, there have been quite a few of these peer workshops in the testing space recently. Here are some pointers:

• Swedish Workshop on Exploratory Testing
• Dutch Exploratory Workshop on Testing
• London Exploratory Workshop in Testing
• ,Calgary Perspectives On Software Testing
• Los Altos Workshop on Software Testing.

Hope to meet you in the nicest city in the world. Hope you are as excited as we are.