About This Episode:
In this special episode, we’re delving deep into the pressing challenges that automation engineers face daily and how our upcoming Automation Guild 2025 event is set to tackle these issues head-on.
Don't miss it register for Automation Guild now!
We’ll discuss fresh survey data from over 200 automation professionals and explore pain points like test maintenance headaches, complex environments, AI integration, and much more.
We also have some exciting sessions to preview, including techniques to scale tests without piling up technical debt, battling automation antipatterns, and leveraging AI for end-to-end testing. Plus, we’ll touch on critical career advice and the ever-important aspect of team buy-in and collaboration.
So get ready for an episode packed with practical insights and expert advice designed to help you succeed in your automation journey. Don’t miss out on this one—it’s going to be epic!
Support the show and also check out this episodes sponsors BrowserStack testing solutions.
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About This Episode’s Sponsor: BrowserStack
Test automation teams often face challenges like flaky tests obscuring real failures, guesswork-driven defect triage, lack of automation quality metrics, time-consuming debugging, and repetitive manual test verification. Add to this a fragmented testing stack requiring multiple tools for test tracking, reporting, and failure analysis, resulting in wasted hours and delayed productivity.
BrowserStack’s Test Observability changes the game by streamlining these processes. It provides unparalleled visibility into every test execution in CI pipelines, leverages AI to remediate failed tests and proactively enhances test-suite reliability.
Key Benefits of Test Observability:
Real-Time Insights: Consolidate test reporting for UI, API, and unit tests; detect flaky tests and failures; and visualize results by modules or folders.
AI-Powered Debugging: Categorize failure reasons, identify root causes of failures, and utilize timeline debugging with logs and history in a single pane.
Enhanced Automation Stability: Monitor test health trends, build custom dashboards for key metrics, and receive actionable alerts for proactive fixes.
Quality Gates for Continuous Deployments: Automate build verification, create custom rules for stability and flakiness, and integrate seamlessly into CI/CD and SCM tooling.
With BrowserStack Test Observability, you can simplify your automation stack, reduce debugging time, and deliver quality software faster. Learn more about how it can help your test automation workflows!
About Chris Trimper
Chris Trimper, Enterprise QA Automation Architect, Independent Health
Chris has been involved in software testing for over 16 years, dedicating most of that time to adding efficiencies in the testing process through functional test automation. He is currently the Test Automation Architect for his QA team at Independent Health, leveraging various tools and techniques for functional automation and performance testing. He has had the opportunity to speak at various conferences on software testing and monitoring aspects. Over the past few years, he has begun to adopt forms of AI in the toolbox of efficiencies in testing.
Connect with Chris Trimper
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- Company: Independent Health
- Blog: trimper.wordpress.com
- LinkedIn: www.christrimper
- Twitter: www.lazyautomator
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[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.
[00:00:34] Joe Colantonio Hey, welcome to a special episode where we're going to dive deep into What's Keeping Automation Engineers Up at Night. And more importantly, are the upcoming Automation Guild 2025 is addressing these challenges head on? I'm your host, Joe Colantonio. And joining me today, we have Chris Trimper on Test Guild community leader, and today, we'll be analyzing fresh survey data from hundreds of automation professionals in our community. Understand the real challenges you're facing. A survey revealed a bunch of really crazy, fascinating insights about who's in the trenches of test automation today and the things that are causing the biggest headaches. We're seeing an equal split between QA engineers and SDETs leading the charge, each representing about 30% of respondents. With QA managers and leads rounding out the leadership roles. Let's talk about what's keeping you up at night. Before we get into it, let's hear it from this week's episode sponsor. Based on over 500 episodes on this podcast, I know the test automation teams often face the following challenges daily, overlooking real test failures due to flaky tests, performing defect triage based on mere guesses, no measure of automation quality, time consuming tests failure debugging processes and turning to repeat manual test run verifications, making it even more complex as the fragmented automation testing stack, one has to hop onto multiple tools to help figure out tests, health tracking, test reporting, and test failure analysis. This takes hours to triage and debug test failures after every run. That's why this week's sponsor BrowserStack told me they built their solution tests observability. Test observability provides visibility into every test execution in your CI pipelines, utilizing AI to remediate failed tests and enable proactive improvements of test suite reliability. For example, they have a smart test reporting in built in insights in real time to help you track all automated tests in one place, whether it's UI, API, or unit tests. It can detect flaky always failing test and new failures help you visualize test failures by test modules or folders. It also helps you debug failed tests faster utilizing AI. Some examples of this is it gives you failure reason categorization with AI-based tagging. You can use it to identify the unique errors that lead to the most test failures. And it has timelines debugging with test logs and pass test history in a single paint. It could also help you improve automation stability with the analytics. For example, you can monitor test health and build trends across projects, build custom dashboards to track key automation metrics, and create custom alerts to identify fix issues proactively. And finally, it has awesome quality gates to enable continuous deployments so you can automate, build verification for faster PR merges and deployments. You can create custom rules based on stability, new failures, flakiness, and more. And integrate quality gates status into your CI/CD or SCM tooling. Click on the link down below and see test observability in action for yourself, for your particular use case.
[00:03:42] Hey, Chris. Welcome to The Guild.
[00:03:43] Chris Trimper Hey, Joe. Thanks for having me back. I see we have the similar place that we go shopping at. You got a represents, right?
[00:03:51] Joe Colantonio Right. Very cool. It's great to see you. Look right in the Guild callers as well. And as I as I mentioned, Chris, you've been the community leader pretty much since we started unofficially, now you are officially. So thank you for all you do for the community. I really do appreciate it.
[00:04:05] Chris Trimper It's a blast. Thanks for having me.
[00:04:07] Joe Colantonio Absolutely. So, Chris, I just want to go over really quickly to give people some insight into what Automation Guild is and how we create it and then maybe go over some of the sessions that we're going to help them. I thought it'd be kind of cool to go over some of the survey results every year. I run an annual survey to our community and ask them what the number one thing is that they're struggling with. And then based on the information, we find sessions and speakers to fulfill those things that they say that they need to learn more about. I guess looking at these results, we have three main themes that came up, maybe four, but the first one is test maintenance headaches. Is probably a theme we see every year. Got a lot of survey respondents really consistently site maintenance as the top challenge because they all say they struggle with flaky tests and reliability issues and it's a bunch of time sink of updating tests for dynamic UI changes. Now, I was laid off 5 years ago, so I haven't been hands on like you are. So is this still something you're seeing as well?
[00:05:08] Chris Trimper Man, it's still a headache. I mean, between code changes and certainly for all of our developer friends out there not dragging on developers, that's not it. But between code changes, requirements changes, experience changes. And then I'll throw one out there that's been hitting us more framework changes, whether it be templating frameworks or shifting platforms developing terms that I don't totally know. There's an immense amount of reasons in which our test may need to be updated from the way in which they interact with our application, whether it be a browser, whether it be a mobile app. I mean, jeez, when you're talking about mobile apps. The vendors will throw us a loop all the time. New iOS update, new Android updates. All of a sudden Samsung thinks, I'm sorry, I'm not picking on anyone. But also they think that something new needs to happen the experience also is like, well, I wasn't planning for that. And then when you're talking about your sprint cadence and what you're trying to do and trying to move forward, it feels like you're trying to take a couple of steps forward, but you're perpetually being moved back. And we always lean towards test automation as a way to allow us to get rid of all the craft of things like regression that we don't want to have to do a full manual regression every time. We can do an automated fashion. But how in the heck do we keep that so that it's maintenance free? That is a perpetual struggle and it hasn't changed. There's just been new reasons that keep popping up on us almost monthly basis.
[00:06:36] Joe Colantonio Chris, it's just like one of those unsolvable problems. You think this will be with us at the time?
[00:06:41] Chris Trimper I think if we sat around and did nothing, the problems would amount and we'd have this huge heaping pile behind us that we don't know what to do with. Thankfully, we do have ways that we can get past them. I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm just saying that the test maintenance is a legitimate thing and it's going to constantly poke its head up and find us. But we don't want to have this insurmountable task. We want to have it so that instead of it taking 5 hours this sprint, 10 hours next sprint, 15 hours the next minute, we want to kind of keep it at bay. We want to do intelligent things to maintain things. But it'll probably never stop. There'll probably be new things that keep happening. But I mean, isn't that part of what makes our job in software testing interesting? Like we don't get then this because it's like, you know what? I want to make sure that the buttons read every time and every time we do a deploy, I want to make sure that that button's right. That's not why we do it. We do it for the excitement, for the change, for the new technologies, the new things that hit us. From a person who likes to solve problems, it's fine. But you know what? If I can come to an event on a yearly basis, join a community that's perpetual, that will continually help me figure out how to fix these things, to communicate with them, to collaborate, to commiserate. That's fantastic. I think there just might be a couple of things in this year's Guild that really address that number one problem.
[00:08:05] Joe Colantonio Absolutely. I'm going to dive in that soon. I just want to go over some a few other main pain points. And then like you said, I think there are a lot of sessions that we chose to share that I think can help people with that problem number one, which is test maintenance and a bunch of other issues. I guess the second issue, which is always been an issue for me and for you, because I know you've always worked probably in an enterprise environment like I have, and that is testing complex environments, microservices, distributed system testing. You just mentioned mobile testing. You probably do web testing, desktop testing. I had to do mainframe testing back in the day, and there's a lot of challenges that like setting up proper test management and also having a mock services, maybe third party that you don't have in your environment. There's a lot of complexity going on nowadays, I think, with modern software development.
[00:08:50] Chris Trimper So yeah. Joe I mean you're talking about all these complex environments, so let's just take services as an example. Services are something that nobody ever wanted to touch. Like I don't want to touch these services are so complicated. And then we finally get used to and I'll take you down the journey that I went through. SOAP services, yes, people are cringing about that now. I know we've gotten past that. But you had your SOAP services like, I finally tackled this. I have services that are sending you returning XML. It's great. JSON what? What's that JSON thing? What's this REST thing? And then you're just so complexity. You're talking about complexity. You just finally start understanding REST services and then there's RESTful services. I'm like a who? What do you mean? We went to rest to something more? And then you had to figure out that. And now we have microservices. It's just an example of how something small a service can continue growing and changing, add complexity to it, and it is something that's going to continually get complex. I think this is a grand reason why we need communities. And I mean, I'm the community manager some of the pimp of communities is all I can. That's why we need these communities. I mean, we need these events so we can continually learn. The number one question I'll ask anybody that I ever interview is how do you stay current? And the reality is I'm not going to engage them on what books they use, what websites they use, who they follow. But if they kind of look at me with like those stair going, what do you mean by keep current? I'm going to be terrified because complex systems are just getting more and more out there. We were all on premise. Now there's so much cloud, there are so many things that continue to grow. Not even talking about things like end-to-end test that are things that go on and off people's radar all the time. That is a definitely a level of complexity in addition. They're going to keep getting more complex. I couldn't even possibly predict what complexities are coming in 2025, 2026 and etc.. But you need a way to stay current so that you can be prepared for these sorts of things.
[00:10:52] Joe Colantonio 100% agree with you. Especially as I get older. I don't think we would survive in this industry if we did not stayed current. That's one of the reasons why I started Test Guild and Automation Guild because for myself, there wasn't anything like that for me. I create it. And luckily we have awesome contributors like yourself, experts that really contribute to the community as well to help people stay up to date. So I love that. Alright, the third challenge I saw, and this has always been it's again is buying and team collaboration. A lot of people mention getting team buy in for automation initiatives are still a struggle. Breaking down silos, developers and QA. And managing expectations around automation and the dreaded word ROI. Chris, I'm sure you work for a large company and I'm sure you must be in tons of meetings. And then even after that, since I'm sure there'll be miscommunications. Any thoughts on buy in and team collaboration issues?
[00:11:47] Chris Trimper Yeah. I mean, you're talking about buy in for automation initiatives. Sometimes just as buy in of for a project that comes up, trying to justify the automation resources for it to justify whether or not you're going to have automation. And then, there's a lot of conversations that come in and that even jumps to that third point that you made about ROI, where you're kind of doing this song and dance of is it worth it? Is not worth it? You kind of feel like it might that century old snake oil salesman that's trying to sell something. Am I trying to over justify myself? No, we're just. It all boils down to wanting to add efficiencies to our testing processes. And that's what we're doing the automation for. But there's so much there. You talk about buy in, sometimes it's just buy in for a strategy. And we're not talking about, say, Cypress versus Playwright versus Selenium versus a gazillion other things out there. It could be as simple as technique Framework, no framework. What language am I going to choose? How am I going to do my configs? You don't want to have it so everybody is perpetually reinventing the wheel. You want to be able to set forth some best practices. You want to have good relationships with your developers, you want to break down those silos. Hopefully, we don't have those, but sometimes those silos are kind of forced upon us, especially if you end up being stuck in a group where you have these almost, you all work for the same organization, but you feel like you're in separate groups and you feel like, well, we're just throwing things over the wall because that's what we're bound way. Definitely collaboration is key. I know so many of us work from home. I work remote myself, but that's not an excuse to not be in touch with others and to not do that. Certainly, it's an absolute key. And sometimes you need to watch some trainings or see other people's experience to realize, there's that technique or there's this way that I can collaborate with that other group that I just didn't realize before. And ROI, I mean, does anybody have a perfect ROI calculator? Probably not. Thinking about that buy in. There's times you need to just buy in of what is our ROI? What does ROI mean for us? What is our definition of ROI for this project initiative?
[00:13:53] Joe Colantonio Absolutely. Chris, it's a good point you just brought up is having a community to go to, to actually find out how they got buy in or team collaboration. I know a lot of times, but I love about Automation Guild is someone we have a session on something, but you can ask questions live and it doesn't have to necessarily be for that specific topic, even though we like to keep it on topic because these are experts. If you have a question like how did you get buy in for that technique and get buy in for that tool or solution? And you can ask those type of questions live with these experts and get their feedback, which I think is kind of unique as well.
[00:14:27] Chris Trimper Yeah, no, it certainly is, especially because not only, the kind of neat thing a bout The Guild and I'm not saying this is what you should be doing all the time is while the sessions going on, you have this unique capability through the community to chat with other people. Now, this is something in a live environment that's frowned upon because it's like, shh listen to the speaker, let them do their talk. But if you wanted to like pass a secret notes to the person, three seats down from and say, hey, I'm doing it this way, does that sound right to you? You can do that through the community. Again, please kindly pay attention to the individual speaking and be engaged. But you have this unique opportunity for engagement that you don't necessarily have in other venues, and you're 100% correct. Somebody is talking about how I did this particular thing. You get an opportunity to ask them about the history of what they've done. It's not just that moment of their presentation. And lastly, this makes me think about what I would call soft skills presentations. You know, not every presentation in the guild has to be vastly technical. There's a lot of soft skills that are incredibly beneficial that can help you not only in decision. Need to make today. It can help you shape your decisions for the future.
[00:15:37] Joe Colantonio Absolutely. And I don't think we could get to the sessions without first talking about AI. I know I see a lot of things on LinkedIn, like people are sick of AI, but based on a survey results, it was the number one requested topic in our survey. And it's all kinds of very AI. They want to know more about AI, enabled open source using AI for better deflect reporting. AI integration with existing frameworks, practical applications for the daily task. A bunch of different things for AI. I think I'm in the minority here. I think AI is actually underplayed or under hype, might just be me. Chris, I know you have strong opinions with the AI as well. But yeah, any thoughts?
[00:16:16] Chris Trimper I think a lot of it comes to, if you go back, I can't even figure if it was 8 years ago or more probably more where you were getting the same kind of things about test automation. There's this test automation thing. I know I need it, but I don't know why I need I don't know why do I need it for? And I think what you're talking about is really just crowdsourcing information. I have a bunch of people together, like minded people. I have some really fantastic people that have offered up to the community to speak to present. And now the topic is about this AI thing. And if I was to sit and research AI, I might be able to come up with the same kind of answers. But it might take me a heck of a long time. And what am I not doing because of that? So if I can instead say, AI is just something I need to know more about, so if I can get that crowdsourced through this fantastic platform, then I'm going to totally do it. I'm going to learn from others. I'm going to engage others or ask others to share their experiences. Now instead of, this is kind of an x factor for what we're doing. And I want to turn this into math example, but if I'm sitting here doing work. At the same time, for other people are doing work about A.I. things, well then in the same time that I did work, I get to be spoon fed in a very wonderful fashion. All of this great information with different opinions, different points of view, and all of a sudden I've got all this information funneling into me and I've got all these perspectives of AI that would have been very difficult to get without that.
[00:17:50] Joe Colantonio Absolutely. And unique thing I'm adding to this year's event is when you get the 5-day ticket, I have an AI bot that's going to be trained just on the speaker sessions and the live Q&A and all the documents. Throughout the year, you'll have access to it and you can interact with that. And give me a summary of what Scott Moore talked about or, what are the top questions asked at this year's event. Just help almost act like a coach? So we like to say it's not just an online event, it's not a 1-done event. You get community before, during, and after the event is over and you get access to all the recordings and also this bot is going to be trained specifically on just that content so you can get the quick bits throughout the time. If you're working two months later and you're like, I'm struggling with this, I heard something Automation Guild, let's go. But it was you could just query that bot and an hopefully he'll get you information you need quickly as well.
[00:18:38] Chris Trimper That's really cool because there's a lot of seeds that are planted. And if you think about it over the course of the week, there's minimum, everybody should walk away with at least 20 seeds planted, if not more. That's a lot of stuff. Throughout the year, like, Hey, I remember that thing, but I don't remember enough about it. Unless, of course, Joe, you're volunteering to give everybody your phone number so that you can answer the question which you're not, that that's going to be fantastic to be like, Hey, there was a session about this thing and it's you're going to provide enough information for it to seek that out and make it available to you. That's a really cool thing.
[00:19:12] Joe Colantonio Awesome. And definitely, like I said, people can give it a try by joining the Automation Guild this year by going to AutomationGuild.com. By the 5-day ticket you get access to that. And I feel like this is a Telethon that's like the only time of year I actually ask anyone to go and spend money on a ticket. But I think it's to benefit them. It's not just for the TestGuild. We create it to try to be of value to you so that you're getting value all year long. And also besides the bot, when you buy a ticket, you get access to the community for the whole year and we get one individual new session every month where just the guild, joined Automation Guild get to interact with a unique speaker that they voted for as well throughout the year. It's not just five days, every month we have a new training as well. Based on what people said, Hey, I'm strong with this. This month we get a speaker to fill in for this and we try to do that as well.
[00:20:02] Chris Trimper Yeah. I mean, for, geez, almost pennies a session. I mean, you're seeing the ability for these speakers to come together at the platform to do it because certainly not anything is just free anymore. The ability to just hold this conference is key. And I mean, there's really a lot of great sessions out there. I don't know if you wanted to touch upon any of them, Joe, but certainly there's all different walks of life coming together, offering up the opportunity to share with us. And the really nifty thing is the interactions because let's remember, a large majority of the speakers will be in the community themselves. So if you pick a person, speaker X is talking about a thing. And it's not until tomorrow that you remember the question you would ask them. There's a high likelihood that you can write that question and ask. You don't really get that anywhere else. I mean, maybe the next day you see them standing in line reading it at their breakfast, but do you really want to bother them in their personal time? You have a platform to do this with. And the neat thing is, is you don't have to leave your home. You don't have to travel. You don't have to get lost luggage. You don't have a plane delayed. And disappoint your family for being late. You're just there.
[00:21:10] Joe Colantonio Absolutely. And this is going to be our 9th annual event. So we just didn't start this up.
[00:21:13] Chris Trimper Before it was trendy. We'll call-
[00:21:15] Joe Colantonio Way before it was trendy. We started in 2017. We are pretty a format that's been based on feedback every year. I think pretty honed in to where I think it's pretty effective based on what I hear from attendees, for sure. Alright Chris, like you mentioned, I thought let's connect some of these challenges with specific sessions, maybe at this year's Automation Guild. I guess maybe start maybe with test maintenance challenges and things like that. It's the first one that pops in my head is, one of the main things also we heard a lot from is I know a lot of people ask for help with Playwright because it seems to be a growing trend for more folks using it, not saying it's better than any other framework or it's a tool that's better than any other, but it just seems the wrong trends.
[00:21:59] Chris Trimper It's the current new kid on the block that everybody's interested about. We'll call it that.
[00:22:04] Joe Colantonio Absolutely. And we also like to say, even if the session about, say, like Framework X, say it's about Selenium or Playwright, Cypress., it doesn't matter. You could take things away from that and apply it to your existing tool as well. If you're not using Playwright and use Selenium, I'm sure there's a lot of things are key takeaways you could use to apply to Selenium as well, best practices and things like that. But one that really I'm excited about is Andrew Knight is kicking off the event with his next level Playwright testing techniques. He's going to show folks how to scale up to thousands of tests without crippling technical debt. I know a lot of people struggle with, so that's one that definitely caught my eye for test maintenance or challenges like that.
[00:22:43] Chris Trimper Yeah, that one definitely looks pretty good. And again, you're 100% correct where just because they're going to be talking about a particular tooling or in this case, Playwright, it doesn't mean that some of these techniques can't be borrowed and utilized and moved to one thing or another. And I think, I have to talk about enterprise tools versus open source. I mean, a lot of the techniques are transferable even within those. If you come to it and say, I don't use open source tools, I use enterprise tools, how can this help me? It absolutely can, and even vise versa. I know some people get a little bit flustered because they're like, Well, I don't want to listen to sales pitches. Behind every single vendor that will speak, every single sponsor that is making this conference doable and affordable at the low cost of an individual ticket is really great knowledge. These are industry experts, people that have been in all of our shoes with the same kind of problems that we have, solving them and sharing experiences with us, whether they're sharing what they think is going to happen in the future, sharing some modern takes on things, whatever they're sharing, it's all transferable. If some enterprise vendor is talking about something web related, it's probably going to relate to the web project that I have as well.
[00:23:55] Joe Colantonio Alright. I don't want to go off on a rant here, but maybe because it's my age I start off with vendor tools. Vendors speak with a lot of customers, a lot of different verticals. It's not like them making stuff up. I know a lot of people think it's marketing, but they actually have a solution that they sell that people are purchasing and they're helping throughout the years, all these different areas. I'm pretty sure that they speak in a lot of diverse companies and in technologies and know ways to work around things that someone may not have just working on a simple browser, with say Selenium, I'm not discounting that, but I'm just saying they bring a lot of wealth of knowledge as well, not just trying to sell too but am I wrong here? Am I going off the rails?
[00:24:37] Chris Trimper No, not at all. Any time you have an opportunity to talk to an individual that has a wealth of experience beyond like a small handful of companies, there's great benefit that can be gotten from that person, whether it's the person that's marketing their own consulting company. That helps, on average, ten companies a year over the past 10 years. That's a lot of various interaction points that they've had and a lot of opportunities they've had to see problems solve problems. I think back to any time that you have new people come in to a company that you work with and they say, Gosh, I'm not over promoting myself, I'm just speaking facts, Gosh, how do you know all that stuff? I'm like, I'm screwed up more than you. I've solved more problems than you have. That's it. It's not this. Well, okay, Some of this gray it, those become the problems that I find. But let's face it, it's all about the experiences the experience has helped shaped who we are. And vendors are in a unique position where they get to see a ton of stuff and that's a wealth of knowledge that we can benefit from as they come and join us and talk to us.
[00:25:46] Joe Colantonio And along the same kind of trends here as we have Anna Patterson, talking about battling test automation anti patterns. She is a Cypress ambassador. She'll be using Cypress. But I asked her to make it so that even though she's demonstrating these anti patterns with Cypress, these anti patterns are patterns. So patterns would apply to any type of automation tool. I think that's going to help, I think, address a lot of issues people may have with flaky tests and maintenance issues of.
[00:26:12] Chris Trimper Yeah, and I'm just going to go on the record and say, I think you're going to be tripped up having Anna Patterson talk about patterns. Anna, Thank you. Thank you for that. I cannot wait for the tongue twisters on that day. But seriously, exactly. I mean, all of these things are transferable. We shouldn't be thinking that were also overly unique with the one corner that we're in doing automation. We're talking about things like selectors and locators. I know that's a hot topic has been a hot topic for a while since selectors and locators became a notion. Web as web as web. I'm just going to say it's. And I know a lot of people are probably fight me on that. But it all kind of boils down to some common techniques that we can use. And I think that's what makes The Guild so darn wonderful, is that we all realize that we're all kind of testing the same thing. It's just a different flavor. And that's why we can offer up this community that has the opportunity for everyone to lean on each other.
[00:27:10] Joe Colantonio 100%. And so I know a lot of people are struggling trying to learn more about AI. We have a fair amount of sessions on AI. We highly recommend you head on over to AutomationGuild.com and check it out. I know one I'm kind of excited about is we have Jason Arbon talking about end-to-end automation leveraging AI. H e's going to touch on a lot of topics using AI, test data. He's going to using real world examples. I think he's going to test against the Automation Guild sire. The Test Guild site and it's going to be really practical hands on implementation of AI, that's just one of many sessions by that is one that stands out to me. I think that people are going to get value from.
[00:27:48] Chris Trimper yeah, I mean, sessions like that are fantastic. You have people that are groundbreaking in the industry like Jason that are where we'll be some day, right? He's going to be perpetually steps ahead of us in the realm of A.I. because of his mission and his cause. If we can learn from and he's willing to come and talk to us to help us understand where we should be going, where we should be focusing on, people should be clamoring at sessions like that to say, Jason, what areas should we be focusing on? The world of A.I. is so confusing. Help me figure out where to focus. And I have this practical hands on end-to-end automation technique, provided by him is going to be fantastic. I'm certainly looking forward to that as well.
[00:28:33] Joe Colantonio Yeah, and it's actually followed up by the same day. Lee Barnes is going to be talking about non deterministic systems and a lot of people have been saying, how do we test a system now? That's out of my control. It's not deterministic where before we're used to this, then that. How do you do that? So I think Lee Barnes brings a lot, a lot of experience as a consultant with many, many companies I'm really excited about also.
[00:28:54] Chris Trimper Yeah. I know. Absolutely. And I would say for the most part, unless your company is technology averse, this is something that we're all going to hit someday, whether it's this year or next year. I don't know when. Whether you implement it yourselves or you integrate with the vendor that's doing this for you, you're going to probably need to do some proofing of this. And this is one of those seeds that hopefully gets planted in everyone so that you're like, I'm thankful for that seed. I now have the clean of hope of how to do that thing.
[00:29:25] Joe Colantonio Absolutely. And I guess once again, along those lines, I think you're going to pick up a lot of also for the session from David Burns. David Burns, it's been a thought leader and automation special in Selenium in for years. He's one of the first, I thought, like online famous people I met once at a conference. I'm like, it's David Burns, but he's doing sessions on your test framework. Isn't the reason your tests are flaky, which I think is an important topic as well.
[00:29:49] Chris Trimper Wonder if he's going to call me if like, I wonder if I'm a flaky, maybe I'm flaky, maybe that's the problem. But I mean, having someone else's perspective on that's going to be great. That's definitely one that I think is going to be thought provoking, and I hope that's kind of thing that someone has a bunch of takeaways for because the flakiness of tests or the perceived flakiness of tests is something that will put you in a downward spiral for maintenance and the kind of thing that can make you feel like, I just got to abandon this and start over when that might not be the case. I think he can save lots of headaches from people with that. That's going to be awesome.
[00:30:24] Joe Colantonio Absolutely. They also try to choose a lot of sessions that we like to tackle, but we also like not soft skills, but the small soft skills, things that you can apply or better your career almost. And so Christine Pinto is doing a really cool session on debugging your career. How I Hacked My Way from QA to CTO, which is pretty.
[00:30:43] Chris Trimper Impressive.
[00:30:43] Joe Colantonio Right.
[00:30:44] Chris Trimper That caught my attention for two reasons. One. I mean, she spoke to our hearts by saying, debugging your career, Whooo. You know and how I hacked my way. That definitely just makes it sound a little bit devious and totally getting into our wheelhouse. But to go from QA to CTO, unless of course, you're a one person shop, that's the kind of thing you're like, that's an option for me. Because so many times you wonder if you're stuck in this one career path and I don't go anywhere. But certainly, I hope this goes to show that there are options for everyone. The soft skills of learning this kind of technique or showing people a door is just wonderful.
[00:31:22] Joe Colantonio Absolutely. Also what I think is, unfortunate, a lot of people are going through changes in their career, let's say. And Robert has a really good session. He was recently laid off. He was hired, I think, also recently. But he's been a session laid off. Now what do I do? Which I think is going to help a lot of people. I was laid off 5 years ago, still technically laid off, but I'm really curious to know what Robert recommends doing in this situation.
[00:31:44] Chris Trimper I applaud Robert for having the guts to come out and talk about this. And a lot of people, think of being laid off as a bad thing and they don't want to admit to it. But I think you need to know that it's not that bad. Robert's going to show us that for sure. And places like The Guild or a place where you can turn to maybe what you thought as a negative into a positive and turn it around. This one looks really great. Certainly, something that I think will resonate with people. I feel terrible for those that it does resonate with because they're getting laid off. It's something that's never pleasant. But hopefully, Robert gives us a little real sunshine or opportunities to brighten our day.
[00:32:26] Joe Colantonio Absolutely. And what I like about the end of day three is whenever a roundtable with Richard Bradshaw, Mike Lyles, and Vernon Richards to go over basically, what it takes to succeed as a tester in 2025. These are thought leaders that have been around for a long time. They have a lot of really cool insights. They've written books. Mike Lyles works for the Maxwell Leadership Institute. I don't know if you know the famous Maxwell. I forgot his first John Maxwell, I think. He wrote a ton of books and he actually works for a company and is officially trained. So you say help. You can ask him any question about leadership, career development, testing, where they see things going. I think it's going to be a really great way to round out maybe people that just have the 3-day ticket, how they can take what they learned and actually implement it throughout the rest of the year.
[00:33:13] Chris Trimper That sounds great. I mean, anytime you have an opportunity to not only collaborate on the future and planning, I mean, it's still quarter one of the calendar year, people are still trying to formulate their things. Maybe you're trying to figure out what's going to be the thing that makes your mark in 2025. I would hope that this helps shape some minds and helps you figure out. There's this area I wasn't thinking about that. Richard, Mike, and Vernon kind of opened up my eyes to and you have this opportunity to grow and mature in that way that's going to help you make a difference this year.
[00:33:46] Joe Colantonio Absolutely. And there's a 3-day ticket and a 5-day ticket. That's a 5-day ticket. Also includes, like I said, the AI Joebot, sort of Automation Guild also two workshops and topics outside of just functional automation. We have topics about performance testing, security testing for quality engineers. We have sessions on creating a testing ecosystem, understanding observability, running your tests in Kubernetes, building a global accessibility testing framework. Selenium Manager, How to dockerize your test, bunch of other test DevPerfOps, which is a new thing that Scott Moore just started initiative and also getting started mobile testing with Maestro, which is an open source tool. I think a lot of people add value from. That's the last two days and I think that adds a lot of topics little more advanced, but also topics that may be a little outside your comfort zone. But I think it's topics that you need to know to really excel in 2025. And it's really good skills to have to make you more employable as well.
[00:34:43] Chris Trimper Yeah. And I mean, let's remember we all have the projects we have today, but then we have the projects of tomorrow that we don't know about. And if you're thinking about one of those, we hear things about security and performance for like and that's not for me. Just attending sessions about this can help you become more knowledgeable, help you understand things more. There was a session about vector databases as it relates to AI, for example. And most people are thinking vector what? I thought this was used in video games like way back when and why would I need vectors? But I'm not saying that you all need to know how to build a vector database, but understanding how vectors play into AI can certainly help you in the future and can actually help your perception of knowledge of the current land space. All of these things are things that can relate to us. There all things that we're going to probably hit at one point or another. And if we can have something that will just kind of fast pace us or give us an opportunity to go. What do you mean by that? And instead know it already? That's just going to be fantastic.
[00:35:46] Joe Colantonio Absolutely. So as I mentioned, the beginning the survey shows that we're all facing similar challenges. But I think Automation Guild 2025 is going to bring together experts who have solved these exact problems, and they're here to help you. So we highly recommend, if you haven't already registered for Automation Guild, hand it over using the link down below. Whether you're struggling with test maintenance, complex architecture, AI integration, API testing, all the things and automation, we're going to try to cover, CI/CD. These sessions are designed specifically for your needs and what you tell me you're struggling with in this survey. All right, Chris, before we go, any parting words of wisdom you want to leave the guild?
[00:36:21] Chris Trimper Yeah. Sign up today. Never stop learning. And the best way to never stop learning is to allow yourself to suck things in like a sponge and sign up at the Guild because you will not regret it. Guaranteed.
[00:36:38] Joe Colantonio Love it. All right. That's it for this episode of the Test Guild Automation podcast. Once again, I'm Joe, and my mission is to help you succeed in creating end-to-end full stack, automation awesomeness. As always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers.
[00:36:51] 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.
[00:37:35] 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.
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