Community Dynamics in Automation Testing with Mike Verinder

[00:00:00] In a land of testers, far and wide they journeyed. Seeking answers, seeking skills, seeking a better way. Through the hills they wandered, through treacherous terrain. But then they heard a tale, a podcast they had to obey. Oh, the Test Guild Automation Testing podcast. Guiding testers with automation awesomeness. From ancient realms to modern days, they lead the way. Oh, the Test Guild Automation Testing podcast. With lutes and lyres, the bards began their song. A tune of knowledge, a melody of code. Through the air it spread, like wildfire through the land. Guiding testers, showing them the secrets to behold. Oh, the Test Guild Automation Testing podcast. Guiding testers with automation awesomeness. From ancient realms to modern days, they lead the way. Oh, the Test Guild Automation Testing podcast. Oh, the Test Guild Automation Testing podcast. With lutes and lyres, the bards began their song. A tune of knowledge, a melody of code. Through the air it spread, like wildfire through the land. Guiding testers, showing them the secrets to behold.

[00:00:35] Joe Colantonio Hey, do you want to learn more about testing communities and how you can accelerate your career leveraging them? While you're in for a special treat because today, we'll be joined by Mike, a veteran in the automation testing space and the brain behind some of the most prominent LinkedIn groups for tools like Selenium and Playwright. In this episode, Mike discusses the intricacies of job engagement in the testing community, managing thriving online groups and all things related to automation tools and techniques. We'll explore Mike's extensive background, which includes managing huge online communities, how to grow them and the importance of continuous learning in software testing. Whether you're a seasoned tester or just starting, this episode is packed with practical, invaluable takeaways that can help you stay ahead in your automation testing career. You don't want to miss this episode. Check it out. Also, before we get into it, we're in the early stages of planning Automation Guild 2025, our 9th annual online event taking place February 10th to the 14th. If you have a session idea and you want to be one of our speakers, head on over to guildspeaker.com now and submit your session idea. The guild will be voting soon on what sessions they want at the 2025 event. Get there your idea now. Hope to see you there.

[00:01:49] Joe Colantonio Hey, Mike, Welcome to the Guild.

[00:01:53] Mike Verinder Hey, Joe, How's it going? Great to be here.

[00:01:56] Joe Colantonio Great to have you. Yeah, awesome. I've been excited to get you on the show. We've known each other for a long time. We got to meet up in person at Start East recently. So I thought it'll be great to have you on the show. Just to share all the knowledge you had, you were dropping knowledge all over the place. I guess before we get into Mike, maybe a little background about you. How did you get to automation testing?

[00:02:15] Mike Verinder Automation testing? Yeah, we go back to the glorious days of the .com era and Mercury. And when Big Four's are paying 500 bucks an hour, I think that was probably my entry. Working back at KPMG consulting bearing point and big clients, in my case telecom clients. And we would go in and we would test. And at these times, you had big you still have them. You still have big testing organizations and large enterprises, but 400, 500, 600 people from a testing perspective. And we would often end up implementing Mercury tools and things like that in the process. So that's sort of how I got into the gig.

[00:03:03] Joe Colantonio How much has changed is the same from when you started? Have you seen the still struggles x amount of years after? I won't go over how many years? Well, you could tell by us, maybe it's been a little bit.

[00:03:13] Mike Verinder Obviously things evolved. What I would say is there was a while when even before Mercury, the only thing around really was like, maybe a rational rose. Remember those days?

[00:03:27] Joe Colantonio Yeah. Love that.

[00:03:28] Mike Verinder And then Mercury came into the picture, and then Mercury was really few people in the space at that time. And they came out with some little a couple of products that they still have today, like LoadRunner, obviously, but they had some like smaller adventures and some smaller tools, Astro test or whatever. And the next evolution didn't really change until around Selenium when Selenium came out. And then that started up a whole new evolution of tool vendors that came out and things like that.

[00:04:05] Joe Colantonio Interesting about Selenium, I think you were an early adopter of the technology because you started maybe can you talk a little bit of your group on LinkedIn and how it's grown, but like how did you know that Selenium was going to be a thing?

[00:04:17] Mike Verinder I didn't. Back before Selenium or in the really early days of Selenium, you're still playing around testing. There's SmartBear had tests complete. Like I said, WinRunner was still out there. I don't know. It may have been renamed by then. Probably not though. And there were still a couple of licensed options tools. I actually liked Test Complete back then because I loved that you could spit out different code, right? They had like 5 or 6 different hey, you can write your scripts on these different kinds of code. That was really unique because I would still want to go into a shop and adapt the tool to the shop, right? So if the shop was a Java shop and want Java, if it was a C# shop, I'd want a .Net type environment. And Test Complete some of that. But I guess it was around 2007. JSON came out with Selenium. Selenium was free. In those early days, you're doing a lot of the conversations of, well, it's free, but there's no resources out there that know the tool. You're going to pay $130,000 for an engineer and you're not going to be able to put it in India because nobody knows the tool, so it's free, but it's not really free. And you're going to have all this big infrastructure that you're going to have to pay for. I think I was at a little company called dairy.com. This was I think, 2008. And Dairy is a small little company, they can't pay licenses a whole lot of licenses for anything. And so I just started using Selenium and I put out the Selenium user group on LinkedIn to try to find other people that were using Selenium. And my little team pulled with that tried to work through issues. And back then it was kind of cool too because Jason would get involved a lot more, Jason Huggins. And if we had an issue. Jason when I would could talk back and forth. And it was a neat small little community and I guess that was probably 17 years ago when we did that. The groups, how is he different now? The group is 256,000, 257,000 people. We are anywhere from 900 to 1500 people a week in the group, the group gets low end, the group gets 600,000 views a week, high end, 2 million views a week. And so the group has evolved drastically since that poor little group.

[00:06:54] Joe Colantonio Nice. So that's a huge group. I think you have a lot of options there for folks that are interested in reaching testers. Just curious to know about the evolution of the group, though, the first one is because you have such a large group, I think you could probably get a pulse on over time how things are going. The first thing I want to know is have you seen an increase in people interested in automation testing or a decrease? Can I get asked all the time? This is still a good career path to get in. Obviously, you have 257,000 people in your LinkedIn group and it sounds like it's growing, but is it growing or is it change? And if that makes sense that question but?

[00:07:28] Mike Verinder The dynamics always been the same, alright? It's a little strange. You'll get newbies in that have no experience at all and like what is this tool? I just downloaded it. I can't use it. It's hard to get into. And so they're learning, trying to learn what do I do? How do I do this? And you get experienced developers in there that are willing to teach a little bit. I think that. It's weird, it's a mix of experienced developers and complete newbies and the newbie strain or the new strain of people coming in never really stop because there's always new people coming onto Selenium if that makes sense.

[00:08:14] Joe Colantonio Yeah for sure. So I think another misconception maybe I'm wrong is the group is I think it was I don't know if you renamed it, it's a Selenium group, but when I go in there there's topics of anything to do automation testing. Maybe a little bit of all that. Is the group more general AI or more about test automation is still Selenium heavy? Like how does that go?

[00:08:33] Mike Verinder Yeah, it's whatever the group wants to be, right? What I try to do is not dictate everything that where that conversation goes all the time. I try to do that. One of the things in my group that I constantly have to do is fight spam because I do get a lot of people every week to join that group and even one actor was spam can completely screw up that dynamic. And so if you get a thousand people in a week, let's just say a thousand and you have five that come in and post one a day type of spam and it's just ugly spam. If you're not on top of that, really on top of that and in that group, that sort of messes up the whole dynamic. But what we try to do is I try to have interesting topics, new different tools, believe it or not, another group, this name is Selenium Group, but really technologists go into that group. They always want to hear about different tools and different things are going on. I'll try to keep that lively. There's always somebody coming up with a framework for Selenium. I always try to highlight that. I try to limit what I guess you could call self-promotional post. And I limit self-promotional posts, but if you have a GitHub towards your Selenium automation framework, I don't necessarily call that self-promotional. Self-Promotional as well. It's really apparent when it happens. I don't know, It is a little bit of a different dynamic. It's kind of a mix between Reddit and then the official Selenium Slack channel, which there is an official Selenium Slack channel for you guys. And it's kind of a mix of all of that. It ends up being a mix. I don't try to if a thread has caught attention, like let's say you've got a thousand likes or something like that, I'm not going to delete that kind of. Obviously somebody likes it. But I try to limit like the ChatGPT stuff, ChatGPT stuff is big in LinkedIn, everybody thinks that they're an expert. All their responses are one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Ten ways to do something.

[00:10:56] Joe Colantonio That's I was going to ask, how do you know it's ChatGPT? The way it's formatted?

[00:11:00] Mike Verinder Yeah, the way. Usually it's the way it's formatted. Usually, you can look at the profile of an individual and say, I don't really think this is something that you did a lot of research on. And that's usually the way. If you go through a lot of ChatGPT posts, you'll see it's most of the time it's the same thing over and over and over again.

[00:11:24] Joe Colantonio You mentioned something that I thought was really good. Did you go where what the group wants? You're not a dictator. I guess that leads into community like is that when you look for a community to join, you find that the best approach I would think rather than someone dictating how things are going to go, you let the community decide and bubble up what topics interest them sounds like.

[00:11:42] Mike Verinder I think you need a little bit of both. I think you need some guidelines. I have other groups and I've tried different formats with other groups. I have a Playwright group. If you go in that Playwright group, it's the biggest Playwright group on LinkedIn. It's easy to look up. But if you go into that group, I don't moderate that group much at all. All right used to not moderate that group. Well, what happens if you don't do that at all is it just becomes junk? And no one sticks around and no one listens to what's going on because it's just a big spam group. I try to set guidelines like in my Selenium group, I set guidelines. And then if you meet those certain guidelines and yes, it's wherever the group takes it. Does that makes sense.

[00:12:30] Joe Colantonio Yeah, absolutely. I guess along those lines though, so you have to start moderating the Playwright group. What I found I have a much smaller group than you, private group. I find it's very difficult to get people engaged. When I look at the analytics, I could tell a lot of people looking and kind of lurking. Any tips on how to get people engage or maybe how to self moderate themselves where rather than waiting for you to come around like someone steps up because this is it right for the group?

[00:12:58] Mike Verinder It's a constant little trick. All you have to do is or all I do is really first of all, Joe, I don't know, I try to do different stuff in my group. I don't just keep it to automation topics. I try to come from different angles. I think my most popular host in my Selenium group ever got something like 30,000 likes and which impressions wise, that's a lot because not everybody likes it. And it was a video of, I think a Ferrari and there was a cover on the Ferrari like an air balloon cover kind of thing. If you think of an inflatable covering a Ferrari and then just some guy off camera just throwing stuff at the Ferrari, right? Like, I mean, you would see a ladder being thrown at the Ferrari's, fans, tools, bricks, and stuff like that. You can make it's just a meme, really, that I put together. It says something like, This is what I feel like every Agile release or whatever. And it had massive likes on it and attention. And so it's easy for us as people in QA and just QA in general, just to get so caught up in the nuances of what we do every day, testing this, getting a release out, all of that stuff, sometimes you just want to go somewhere where everyone knows your name.

[00:14:32] Joe Colantonio Right.

[00:14:33] Mike Verinder Right. And you need just a moment to chill. You don't need someone preaching this or that. And I think that helps just having a full picture. And different concepts. That's just one thing but there's a million different types of things. And maybe that goes back to your group too because there's Selenium, the official Selenium Slack channel. All they do are break fix. That's all they do. And it's active and it's good. But I want a wider experience. But I guess engagement, that's my approach is that we just have try to make it somewhere where I would like to stay.

[00:15:15] Joe Colantonio Love that. I guess, along that example, though is I never know what's going to hit or miss with the group. I guess that's what the beauty of a group is because you don't know. Sometimes I'm like, I don't think there's due to all of a sudden I'm like, I am shocked that this is something you're all interested in. Do you find that as well as seems like?

[00:15:32] Mike Verinder Yeah, well, it's bigger than you.

[00:15:35] Joe Colantonio Yes.

[00:15:36] Mike Verinder All right. So as soon as you realize and come to the realization, Look, man, this is bigger than me. I am not Obi-Wan.

[00:15:46] Joe Colantonio Yup.

[00:15:47] Mike Verinder Right. And there are different people with different ideas. And you want to give them room to explore that a little bit and find their success or not. There's a great example in my group, like I asked, I put a topic up in my group about test cases and I don't know, was it Monday? It was either Monday or Sunday night. I mean, as a poll, polls usually work well in my group. And I got a couple of decent responses and a couple of decent feedbacks but I got like, I don't even have 300 votes on that poll. And I consider that a failure in my group, by the way. If you scroll down like there's some other guy that said, Hey, what tool do you like? And the guy that asked that got something like 1200 responses in like two hours. And that's a good example of, when I put time and effort into the post about test cases. I was like, hey, there's still important regulatory. You have regulatory around banking, you have regulatory around health care. Somebody comes in and does an audit, it's an audit trail, basically. And there's time and effort in that post versus some other guy that just stood out. There were other tools and he's got like massive adoption. I don't always know what's going to hit and what's not going to hit. Usually, the more I think about it, the less it's not going to hit.

[00:17:26] Joe Colantonio Right. Right. Yeah. No, it's funny because like you said, I put a lot of work in some of these things that I post it and crickets. And I did a poll. Just a stupid poll for Discord. Well, the platform we're using now for the community and also I heard from people I haven't heard from in a year. It's like, what is going on? But it's a hit or miss, like you said but you never know.

[00:17:47] Mike Verinder Yeah. And like my moderators go through that in the Selenium user group, I've got like four other moderators, three I'm so sorry, three other moderators. And my moderators go through that too. It's like, man, I spent a day researching this and doing this post and it's crickets when I put it out. Yeah, we can always ascertain if something is going to hit or miss and there's a lot of variables. Especially in my group, it's a big world. I think we're in 158 countries in my group and there's always something going on somewhere. I can't tell if it's going to be a really I can guess if it's going to be a really active week or if it's going to be a slow week. But it does this man, it's all over the board. I mean, some I can guess like if it's Christmas week, usually that's a slow week.

[00:18:45] Joe Colantonio I think you might have some best good practices to use as a moderator of a community. What do you think? You find people how can they get the most out of a group? Like do you see people making connections that then lead to jobs or careers. How do you think? Why someone to not only just lurk in a community, but maybe participate?

[00:19:01] Mike Verinder I think that goes back to the group, participating in the group depends on the group. All right. If you are in a product company and the product company has a group, that's probably the best place to go for information on the group because in theory, at least, that's the best place to go, because the programmers, the product companies programmers and things like that are in that group and active in that group. And it usually incentivized to do those activities. In my group, a lot of people come to my group that are fresh from Selenium. It's on LinkedIn, it's professional network to start with. And so it's easy. All they have to do is type in the word Selenium and they see my group. It's not easy to get connected to my group. To other groups, it's a little different, right? How do I find Felipe's group, for example? All right. I have no idea. Unless you post it. I don't know how to find it. Being able to find that group is kind of part of the challenge. And then you're then getting adoption in that group because it's hard to find is a challenge too because once somebody posts so they get a post in, do they get an answer to a post or activity on the post an hour later or three days later? In my group, I allow a lot of jobs. Sometimes that gets over active on jobs. I limit like you can only do two job posts in a row type of things. In my group, obviously I limit self-promotion as well. It's as quickly as some people come into the group, they go out. But I don't know that those backed in. And my group is unique too is I have about this much space. It's kind of like those old days before we had iPhones. We had those Windows, mobile phones. All right. And you had this little bitty space on page one on your mobile phone, and you could see that little space on that first page. And if you ever went to like a second page, you'd never see anything. I've got about this much real estate that people really look at. They don't scroll forever in my group. And I have to keep that content in this little space chart. At least a little bit. That's why my group, when it has spam and has to get immediate eyeballs on the spam, also you lose the attention of the people coming in looking at it. Does that makes sense?

[00:21:34] Joe Colantonio Yeah, absolutely.

[00:21:37] Mike Verinder Normally on mine, jobs get a lot of traction. Lately, jobs have gotten a lot of traction. You get probably 1 in 10 post or how do I do this or how do I do that? Probably 1 in 10 post or this is how you do this or do that. And then a couple of jobs and then you got that's probably about 50, 60% of the post.

[00:21:59] Joe Colantonio So Mike, you've grown this group to huge number. You said you have the largest Playwright group on LinkedIn. I think you also grew another community for an organization. It's a very large number. What's the secret?

[00:22:11] Mike Verinder The other organization you're talking about is Katalon, right?

[00:22:14] Joe Colantonio Yes.

[00:22:14] Mike Verinder And just to let you know, I've got about a dozen groups and I don't necessarily have secrets for all of these. I'll give you a good example. I have automation tools, an automation tool out there called Ginger that nobody knows about that's been out since 2017, I think. And the only reason it caught my eye is because of the name Ginger and people I've red hair and people correlate. And I was like, well, that sounds interesting. I started, I dove into that and looked at that and I guess all approaches from two angles. So that group never got adoption is that tool never really got adoption because of the dynamics of the tool a lot. All right. I think I have ten people in that group. So and it's been around since 2017.

[00:23:12] Mike Verinder Just to let you know, that tool is a UI functional automation tool. It is primarily it was created by a company called Amdocs. I don't know if you've ever heard of Amdocs before.

[00:23:23] Joe Colantonio No.

[00:23:23] Mike Verinder Amdocs is an Israeli billing company. It's made specifically for telecom. Every major telecom. Not every but I would say 95% of the telecom major telecoms use amdocs billing as a platform. That's interesting in and of itself.

[00:23:46] Joe Colantonio Right for sure.

[00:23:47] Mike Verinder They made a lot of tools, believe it or not, based off of COBOL and Power builder. This automation tool was specifically originally designed based offered tools that work with Power Builder and COBOL. It's a very unique space. It's not something that's ever really made for mass adoption. It's grown and evolved a little bit since then. I don't really have a mass secret for all of my groups. I tried different experiment. The whole Playwright thing was an experiment. If I don't even try to control what happens in the group, what happens to the group? And I'm finding not good things. Can you go back into that Playwright group a little bit better. On was a different story, Katalon was a product company, so you're going to have some really strong things movement. There's a lot of different kinds of motion you can have when you're the product company and not to advertise Katalon, but Katalon is a free tool. And so that and their motion for that is the support of that free tool is the community. And so there are so many dynamics that you can work with that to help your users grow, right? In the Selenium group, I myself, for me to create training and things like that on Selenium, that's going to take a lot of work. And a lot of effort and a lot of time. But on Katalon side, I have money behind me so I can build out things of that nature. I can build out programs that are community supported right. Inside like a discourse or talked about discourse inside a discourse, it's the same kind of dynamics as like what's probably the same as your groups, the same as my group, even on LinkedIn. And how do you engage and encourage people and push them to grow themselves, right? Or to do better things themselves. And those are just engagement tactics. LinkedIn polls work really well and discourse polls don't work well at all, but other things work well in discourse like gamification works really well and discourse. I can't do gamification on the LinkedIn platform, so a different strategies for different situations.

[00:26:14] Joe Colantonio Got you.

[00:26:14] Mike Verinder Does that make sense?

[00:26:16] Joe Colantonio Yeah. How about certifications? Certifications seem to help gauge people to try to-

[00:26:21] Mike Verinder I think it depends on well first of all, overall certifications. Sure. Everybody likes to show off a certification and it does help from a job perspective. If you're a product company, that certainly helps as well and you have much more control over that whole process, right? Like if you have to pay for a certification, if it's free. And all different types of controls. If you're like a Selenium, Selenium is a bit of a different use case. I think maybe Udemy is probably a good way to do that, but I have to be really careful. Selenium in certifications is a hot topic. This is a very sensitive topic, right? There are no official certifications in Selenium they're as good as the person generating the paper. And so if I put my name on saying a Selenium certification, I don't ever put my name on a Selenium certification. I'm just don't. All right. And plus, I don't own that product other way,. I don't even own the licensing around that product or anything like that. The product could officially come back to you and say, What the hell are you doing? Right? They could. There are a lot of Selenium certifications out there. They could go back to those people that are offering those and obviously I won't names, even some of the big companies that do that and say you can't do that. But they don't. The people that manage the Selenium group are pretty good group of guys. So they don't mess with that. But from the product perspective if you're on a product and you have certifications, that's a huge. That's when Katalon, that was a huge way for me to grow in tons of different ways, right? So I could put certifications out. I won't charge people for them and there's just tons of different areas where you could do that. You could get freshers that are straight out of school from India, teach them and get them to a certification level point and then have system integrators come in and want people that are skilled with your product because our client is using their product and so they'll want those people, those freshers let's just put it that way that just got out of school that learn that product and be able to put them into a to a project almost immediately. Right? Because I know that they have a certain level of knowledge, right? They're not going to be the lead architect on the project, but they're not going to come into the project cold either. If that makes sense. Yeah, sure. Anyway, it's just sort of depends on the motion. And like if your ship sink and you mentioned you have certifications for Tosca or something and ships sink. But it's three going to get certified in Tosca or something like that. It might not be such a helpful motion, right?

[00:29:20] Joe Colantonio Right. For sure. And Mike, so I want to switch gears really quick and then wrap things up. I guess the first one is maybe question's not meant to be controversial, but I do see it often. Should people still be learning Selenium or as you mentioned, we both started in Mercury and obviously there was just shift to Selenium. I've been hearing more and more about Playwright. More and more people seem to be breaking towards Playwright. I'm not saying one's better the other. I'm not saying one should use Playwright over Selenium but what are your thoughts?

[00:29:49] Mike Verinder What are my thoughts? First of all, the Selenium user group is my largest group and I love the group. I'm in it every day. But I have a Cypress group. I have a Playwright group. I have a TestCafe group. I have a-

[00:30:01] Joe Colantonio Nice.

[00:30:02] Mike Verinder Dallas user group. I have a Ginger group, I guess. If we want to call that a group, I have an A.I group. I have a Jmeter group, so I have a lot of groups. My recommendation to a tester is just to learn as much as you can and absorb as much knowledge as you can. Don't stick yourself in one bucket specifically, even if you know and you love that bucket, you're not as valuable to the market if you just know one thing. I'll give you an example, and this isn't an ad or anything, but I was on Browser stack's site. I downloaded and started using their cordless A.I automation tool not because I have to use it but because I want to know what that tool does and what it doesn't do and how it works and if it works well. Last week I was in TestGrids, automation tool, learning it, seeing what it does well, what it doesn't do well. Last week I was also on QUALTI, that's Qualti.ai tool learning how it works and it's basically a plug in for open source tools to generate test cases, ai test cases. My recommendation for testers is just to be a sponge and learn as much as you can. And because you're not, it's more than likely, as someone who's chosen IT as their career, which our testers have, you're not going to be in the same job using the same technologies everywhere you go. Here, and if so, you need to know multiple stacks and you're better. The more that you know, the more that you know, the better the recommendations come from you. A pet peeve of mine used to be that people would always go into mentation and say, okay, I recommend UFT. Well, it's like all that. Okay, Now, so what other tools do you know that work on a desktop? I don't know any. The answer is like, Well, okay, that's not a true. That's a poor basis for a recommendation. You have to know the full embodiment of the space that we're in and the environment and what tools work with, what situations and what skill sets to be able to craft a plan. When you come into an organization, the first thing if you're a manager, you're either if you're a manager and you're coming in, it's either everything's screwed up and nothing's working and I want you to redo everything or it's I have nothing. Please start from scratch. In both of those situations, you need to come in with well-rounded recommendations from tools and experience that you have. We never walk in to a good situation as test management. We always walk in to somebody else that made some wrong decisions. That would be my recommendation.

[00:33:07] Joe Colantonio All right, Mike, before we go, is there one piece of actionable other than what you just gave us that someone could put into place right away around test automation in our community? And what's the best way to find contact you or learn more about maybe hitting up your LinkedIn group if I have a webinar or something I want to promote, I'm sure you have opportunities for that as well.

[00:33:25] Mike Verinder Sure. If you're a test product company or a conference company too, I guess as well, you can always reach out to me Mike@RougeAdvisory.com to color my hair rouge, Rougeadvisory. And that's all you can get in touch with me. The only big recommendation I would make for testers is simply that just it's a moving ball, it's a moving environment. We're in I.T.. Things are supposed to change. And that doesn't mean that Selenium is bad or Playwright's good or Playwright's bad. And they both have some really, really, really good positives and they both have some opportunities to work on. I don't know if you know Roy, but Roy just presented just the other day a great ING framework for Playwright. I played with that all day.

[00:34:22] Joe Colantonio Ingenious.

[00:34:23] Mike Verinder About two days ago, it was an awesome little framework. You have to have that eye to go out, seek and find those new ways of testing things and what works and what doesn't. That would be my recommendation for our testers out there and test managers as well.

[00:34:42] Joe Colantonio Mike, as you know, I've run an online annual online event called Automation Guild. This could be the 9th annual one coming up. I noticed you did a session around Community. Just curious to get your input around. I think you even ran a poll which I was surprised by in your LinkedIn group on conferences that people like and ours did pretty well. So little thoughts on Guild community, what you might be presenting this year?

[00:35:06] Mike Verinder Yeah, I did submit. I talked to Test Guild, but it wasn't just me. I thought it would be interesting to have a roundtable discussion with just community folks talking about different experiences with communities. And that's a wide group. That could be a wide group of people that that run communities. And I think you would find it interesting because a lot of our communities have different dynamics. We all don't share the same strengths and weaknesses in our communities, and we all can't curtail our communities to just absorb somebody else's strengths. We graciously mentioned my user group a number of times, but one strength of the user group is how easy it is for people to find it. And that's why you have so much volume a lot of times in that group, one weakness being there's a lot I can't do. I don't really have the CMS managing my group. I can't even. The only way that I can email my group is from somebody that has an opt out of LinkedIn notifications. But if you own that group and own that IP, there's a lot that more that you can do out of it. Anyway, my point in that was I think it would be an interesting dynamic to bring people in different groups, different communities, and getting and talking about all the strengths and weaknesses. Ministry of Testing doesn't have the greatest online presence in my opinion, but they do really well at events in Europe. And so everybody sort of has that niche on like where they're really good, and maybe not so good. And anyway, I thought one thing I thought was really cool was our Star East Conference and at our last Star East Conference me and you and Filip and Leandro. Leandro who else? Andy were sitting and just and who else/

[00:37:18] Joe Colantonio Dd mention Filip?

[00:37:20] Mike Verinder Maybe. I don't know. But we all sitting around started talking about this person and sort of eyeballing each other and asking what works and what doesn't work. I don't mind sharing, by the way, what works and what doesn't work because it's so I'm not even sure if I know what works and what doesn't work. After the fact. But I think it would be a neat conversation that give people a lot of direction. And we even talked about Reddit a little bit and nobody has Reddit. None of those guys that I know of, I've read groups, but that's it. The different dynamics. I think that groups would help. And yes, when we talk about I did ask in a poll in my group what conference was the best. I don't have that. I don't have that website up on top of my thing anymore. But I believe at least 85% said Test Guild was their preference conference. And we named because I can only use for companies and a poll. We name three other companies and those three other were well-known conferences and we put Test Guild across those. To me, what that tells me, Joe, is that at least on LinkedIn are groups for a late and a lot of ways. Our groups to talk to each other and measure each other. But that was pretty awesome. I like that too. And that's just an example of some things that I think would be neat from that perspective.

[00:38:53] Joe Colantonio Awesome. And as we mentioned, Automation Guild coming. It's the second week of February every year. If you want to learn more, just go to AutomationGuild.com. We'll have a link for it down below.

[00:39:02] Thanks again for your automation awesomeness. The links of everything we value we covered in this episode. Head in over to testguild.com/a516. And if the show has helped you in any way, why not rate it and review it in iTunes? Reviews really help in the rankings of the show and I read each and every one of them. So that's it for this episode of the Test Guild Automation Podcast. I'm Joe, my mission is to help you succeed with creating end-to-end, full-stack automation awesomeness. As always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers.

[00:39:38] Hey, thank you for tuning in. It's incredible to connect with close to 400,000 followers across all our platforms and over 40,000 email subscribers who are at the forefront of automation, testing, and DevOps. If you haven't yet, join our vibrant community at TestGuild.com where you become part of our elite circle driving innovation, software testing, and automation. And if you're a tool provider or have a service looking to empower our guild with solutions that elevate skills and tackle real world challenges, we're excited to collaborate. Visit TestGuild.info to explore how we can create transformative experiences together. Let's push the boundaries of what we can achieve.

[00:40:22] Oh, the Test Guild Automation Testing podcast. With lutes and lyres, the bards began their song. A tune of knowledge, a melody of code. Through the air it spread, like wildfire through the land. Guiding testers, showing them the secrets to behold.