!rant, question
Hi, as a developer turned tester I was wondering if anyone here would hear a talk about what on earth testers actually do in a project and how they contribute to the product? I mean besides writing automation scripts or checking if all the requirements are met (the latter is really the most boring part of testing).
I am thinking of doing a talk on this but don't know if Devs might be interested and which conferences I should target.

As a developer who probably doesn't appreciate testing as much as he should, it's always good to hear about somebody's role 'from the coalface'. I would suggest another of passion as well. Nobody wants to listen to somebody who doesn't like what they are doing.

Star East and Star West are the big conferences. I was a QA Architect that recently jumped fence to the Application Architecture side of the effort. .

My take on a QA role is an engaged SME of an application, it's role in a system and a breadth of knowledge about the technology and stack in which the application lives. Knowing the subtle differences in Nitro vs V8 JS engines to properly test browser configurations and translating that necessity to test for the stakeholders so they continue to pay for the activity. There's a huge list of things to test and that list needs to be articulated well for automation scripts to exist.

The market is over saturated with entry level quality control testers so a lot of devs don't get to see a true analyst at work.