Community Dynamics in Automation Testing with Mike Verinder

In a land of testers gone widely journey seeking answers, seeking skills, seeking a better way O the Test Illumination Testing Podcast Guiding testers with our nation awesomeness. From ancient realms to modern days, they lead the way. Oh, the testicle Automation Testing Podcast.

Hey, do you want to learn more about testing communities and how you can accelerate your career leveraging them? Well, 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 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. So whether you're a seasoned tester or just starting, this episode is packed with practical and valuable takeaways that can help you stay ahead in your automation testing career. So you want to miss this episode?

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Also, before we get into it, we're in the early stages of Planning Automation Guild 2025, our ninth 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. So gear idea and now. Hope to see you there. Hey, Mike, welcome to the Guild.

Hey, Joe, how's it going? Great to be here.

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 Star east recently, so I thought it'd be great to have you on the show just to share all the knowledge you had. You were dropping knowledge all over the place. So I guess before we get into it, Mike, maybe a little background about you. How did you get into automation testing?

Automation testing?

Yeah.

We go back to the glorious days of the dot com era and Mercury and, you know, when big fours are paying 500 bucks an hour, I think that was probably my entry. So working back at KPMG Consulting, BearingPoint and. And Big clients, in my case, telecom clients, and we would go in and we would test. And at these times, you know, you had big. You still have them, you still have big testing organizations and. 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.

How much has changed or is the same from when you started? Have you seen this? Still struggles, you know, X amount of years after. I won't go over how many years. You could tell by us, you know, maybe it's been a little bit.

So obviously things evolved, right. Even I. What I would say is there was a while when even before Mercury, like the only thing around really was like maybe a rational rose. Right. Remember those days?

Oh, yeah, love that.

And. And then Mercury came into the picture. And then Mercury was. There were very few people in the space at that time. And you know, they came out with some little. A couple of products that they still have today, like Lode Runner, obviously, but they had some like smaller adventures into some smaller tools. Astro Test or whatever. And the next evolution didn't really change until around Selenium, when Selenium came out. So. And then that started up a whole new evolution of tool vendors that came out and things like that.

So interesting about Selenium, I think you were an early adapter, adopter of the technology because you started. Maybe you could talk a little bit about your group on LinkedIn and how it's grown. But like, how did you know that Selenium was going to be a thing?

I didn't. So I, you know, back before Selenium or in the really early days of Selenium, you know, you're still playing around testing. There's, you know, Smart Bear had tests complete. Like I said, Windrunner was still out there. I don't know, it may have been renamed by then. Probably not though. And there was still a couple of licensed options tools. I actually liked Test Complete back then. Cause I love that you could spit out different, different code, right? You could, you know, they had like five or six different. Hey, you can write your scripts in these different kinds of code. That was really unique, right, 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, I'd want Java. If it was a C sharp shop, I'd want a dot net TYPE environment, right? So. And Test Complete did some of that. But I guess it was around 2007, Jason came out with Selenium. Selenium was free in those early days. You were doing a lot of the conversations of, well, it's free, but there's no resources out there that know the tool. So 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. Right. 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. So I think I was at a little company called dairy.com this was, I think 2008. And you know, Dairy's a, a small little company wanting. It can't pay licenses, a whole lot of licenses for, 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 coupled with that tried to work through issues and, and back then it was kind of cool too because Jason would get involved a lot more. Jason Huggins. And if we, if we had an issue, Jason and I would, could talk back and forth. Right. And it was just, it was a neat, small little community. And I, I gosh, that was probably 17 years ago when we did that. So the group's crazy different now. The group is 256, 257,000 people. We add 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. So the group has evolved drastically since that core little, little group.

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. 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. So 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, is this still a good career path to get in? Obviously you have 257,000 people in your LinkedIn group, but it is it. And it sounds like it's growing, but is it growing or is it change? I don't know if that makes sense.

That question, but the dynamic's always been the same.

Yeah.

All right, so it's a little strange. So 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. Right. 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. So I think that's the. It's weird. It's a mix of experienced developers and complete newbies. And the newbie strain or the, the new strain of people coming in never really stop because there's always new people coming onto Selenium, if that makes sense.

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. Yeah, it's a Selenium group. But when I go in there there's, there's topics of anything to do with automation testing. So maybe a little bit about that. Is the group more general AI, more about test automation? Is it still Selenium heavy or like how does that go?

Yeah, it's whatever the group wants to be. Right. So what I try to do is not dictate everything that, 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 that join that group and even one actor with spam can completely screw up that dynamic. Right. 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. Right. 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, I know the group is named as Selenium Group, but really technologists go into that group so they always want to hear about different tools and different things that are going on. So 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 you know, I limit self promotional posts. But if you have a GitHub towards your selenium automation framework, I don't necessarily call that self promotional. Right. Self promotional is. Well, it's, it's really apparent when it happens.

Right.

So I don't know, it's. 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 a, an official Selenium Slack channel. For you guys. And it's kind of a mix of all of that. You know, it ends up being a mix. I don't try to. If some, if a thread has caught attention, like, let's say you've got a thousand likes or something like that. Like, I'm not going to delete that. Kind of. Obviously somebody likes it. Right, right, right.

So.

But I try to limit, like, the Chat GPT stuff. Chat GPT stuff is big and LinkedIn. Right. Everybody thinks that they're an expert. All their responses are, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 10 ways to do something.

That's. I was going to ask, how do you know it's Chat GPT? The way it's formatted.

Yeah, the way. Usually it's the way it's formatted. Usually you look at. You can look at the profile of an individual and say, I don't. I don't really think this is something that you did a lot of research on. Right, right. And that's usually the way if you go through a lot of Chat GPT posts, you'll see it's. Most of the time it's the same thing over and over and over again.

So. So you mentioned something that I thought was really good. You go where the. What the group wants. You're not a dictator. So 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, what topics interest them. Sounds like I think you need a.

Little bit of both.

Yeah.

Right. So I think you need some guidelines. Like, I have other groups and I've. 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. Right. Used to not moderate that group. But what happens if you don't do that at all is it just becomes junk. Right. And no one sticks around and no one listens to what's going on because it's just. It's just a big spam group. So I try to say 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 make sense?

Yeah, absolutely. So I guess along those lines, though, is that you have to stop moderating the playwright group. What I find 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 are looking and, and kind of lurking.

Oh yeah.

Any tips on how to get people engaged or maybe how to self moderate themselves where rather than waiting for you to come around, like someone steps up and goes this isn't right for the group.

So that's a, that's a constant little trick. So you know, all you have to do is. Or all I do is really. First of all, Joe, I don't know if like I, I try to do different stuff in my group. Like I don't just keep it to automation topics. I try to come from different angles. Right. 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. Right. But. And it was a video of I think a Ferrari and there was a cover on the Ferrari, like, 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 Ferraris and fans and tools and bricks and stuff like that. And I, you know, you can make. It's just a meme really that I put together, right. It says something like this is what I feel like every agile release or whatever.

It had massive likes on it, you know, and, 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, you know, testing this, getting a release out, all of that stuff. Sometimes you just want to go somewhere where everyone knows your name.

Right?

Right. And you need just a moment to, to chill, you know, you don't need someone preaching this or that. And so I think that helps. Just having a full, a full picture, right. 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 the 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 a. I try to make it somewhere where I would like to stay, you know.

Love that. So I guess you Know, along that example, though, is I never know what's going to hit or miss with the group. So I guess what, that's what the beauty of a group is, because you don't know. Sometimes I'm like, I don't think this is going to do too well. And all of a sudden I'm like, I am shocked that this is something you're all interested in. So do you find that as well? It seems like, yeah.

Well, it's. It's bigger than you.

Yes. Right.

All right. So as soon as you, you realize and come to the realization, look, man, this is bigger than me. I am not Obi Wan.

Yep.

Right. And they're different people with different ideas, and you want to give them room to explore that a little bit and, and find their success or not. You know, I, There's a great example in my group. Like, I, I asked, I put a topic up in my group about test cases. I don't, I don't know. Was it Monday? It was either Monday or Sunday night.

Yep.

Known as a poll. Polls usually work well in my group. And, you know, I, I got a couple of decent responses and a couple of decent feedbacks and. 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. Right. If you scroll down, like, there's some other guy that said, hey, what tool do you like? And that. And the guy that asked that got something like 1200 responses in, like two hours. Right, right, right, right, right. It's. And that's a good example of, you know, what I put time and effort into the post about test cases.

Yep.

You know, I was like, hey, they're still important. Regulatory. You know, you have regulatory around banking, you have regulatory around healthcare. Somebody comes in and does an audit, you know, you need to set an audit trail, basically. Right. And, you know, there's time and effort in that post versus some other guy that just listed out two or three other tools and, and he's got, like, massive adoption. Right. So I don't always know what's going to hit and what's not going to hit. And the more, usually the more I think about it, the less it's not going to hit.

Right, Right. Yeah. No, it's funny because, like, like you said, I put a lot of work in some of these things and I post it and crickets. And I did a poll, just a stupid poll. Do you prefer Discord or the platform we're using now for the community and all of A sudden I heard from people I haven't heard from in a year. So it's like, what is going on? But it's a hit or miss, like you said. But you never know.

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, for sure. So, yeah, we can't always ascertain if something's going to hit or miss. And there's a lot of variables. Right. So especially in my group, it's a big world, you know, there's. I think we're in 158 countries in my group, and there's always something going on somewhere. So 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's. It does this, man. It's all over the board for sure. I mean, some. I can guess, like, if it's Christmas week, usually that's a slow week. Right, Right. Right.

So I think you went over 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? Like, how do you think why someone should not only just lurk in a community, but maybe participate?

I think that goes back to the group. You know, participating in the group depends on the group. Right. So if you are at a product company and the product company has a group, that's probably the best place to go for information on the group. Right. Because that, in theory at least, that's the best place to go because the programmers, the product companies, Programmers and things like that are. Are in that group and active in that group, and it usually incentivized to do those activities. Right. So, you know, in my group, you know, a lot of people come to my group that are fresh from selenium. It's on LinkedIn, it's a 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. Right. It's that easy to get connected to my group, to other groups. It's a little different. Right. It's, you know, how do I find Philippe's group, for example?

Yep.

Right. I have no idea. Right. Unless you post it. Right, right.

Yep.

I don't know how to find it. So 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 or they get a post and do they get an answer to a post or activity on the post an hour later or is it three days later?

Right.

So, you know, in my group, I allow a lot of jobs. Sometimes that gets overactive on jobs. So 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. So as quickly as some people come into the group, they go out. But I don't know, that goes back to. And. And my group is unique too, is I have about this much space. It's kind of like those old days before you had iPhones. We had those Windows Mobile phones.

Right.

And you, 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. Right. I've got about this much real estate that people really look at. They don't scroll forever in my group. And so I have to keep that content in this little space sharp. Right. At least a little bit. So that's why my, my group, when it has spam, it has to get immediate eyeballs on the spam, else you lose the, the attention of the people coming in looking at it. Does that make sense?

Yeah, absolutely.

So normally on mine, jobs get a lot of traction. Lately, jobs have gotten a lot of traction. You get probably 1 in 10 posts or how do I do this or how do I do that? Probably 1 in 10 posts 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. Right, Right.

So, Mike, you know, you've grown this group to a huge number. You said you had the largest playwright group on LinkedIn. I think you also grew another community for an organization to a very large number. What's the secret?

So the other organization you're talking about is Catalon, right?

Yes.

And just to let you know, I've. I've got about a dozen groups and I don't necessarily have secrets for all of these.

So I'll give you a good example. I Have automation tool. There's 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, you know, I have red hair and people correlate. And I was like, that sounds interesting.

Yeah.

So I started, you know, I dove into that and looked at that and I guess I'll approach this 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 10 people in that group. So. And it's been around since 2017, right?

Oh, okay. Yep, yep.

So 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 referred to amdocs before.

No.

Amdocs is an Israeli billing company. It's made specifically for telecom.

Okay.

All every telecom. Every major telecom. Not every, but I would say 95% of the telecom. Major telecoms use Amdocs billing as their platform. That's interesting in of itself.

Right? For sure.

They made a lot of tools, believe it or not, based off of COBOL and Power Builder. So this automation tool was specifically originally designed based off of tools that work with Power Builder and cobol. So it's a very unique space. It's not something that's ever really. Not really made for mass adoption. It's grown and evolved a little bit since then, but so I don't really have a mass secret for all of my groups. And sometimes I try different experiments. The whole playwright thing was an experiment. Right. That if I don't even try to control what happens in the group, what happens to the group. Right. And I'm finding not good things. So can you go back into that Playwright group a little bit better on was a different story. Catalon 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 Catalon, but Catalan is a free tool. And so that and their motion for that is the support of that free tool is the community. And so you. There are so many dynamics that you can work with that to help your users grow. Right. You know, in the Selenium group I myself for me to create training and things like that on Selenium, it's going to take a lot of work. Right. And A lot of effort and a lot of time. But on Camelon side, I have money behind me so I can build out things of that nature. I can build out programs that are community supportive. Right. Inside like a discourse or. You talked about discourse inside of discourse. It's the same kind of dynamics as like, let's probably say 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 in discourse. I can't do gamification on the LinkedIn platform. So different strategies for different situations.

Gotcha.

Does that make sense?

Yeah. How about certifications? Do certifications seem to help gauge people to try to.

I think it depends on. Well, 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. Right. And all different types of controls. If you're like at Selenium, I. 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. I. Selenium and certifications is a. Is a hot topic, is a very sensitive topic. Right. So there are no official certifications in Selenium. They're as good as the person generating the paper. Right. And, and so if I put my name on saying a Selenium cert, I don't ever put my name on a Selenium certification. I just don't. All right. So it gets you into. And plus, I don't own that product, by the way. Right. I don't even own the licensing around that product or anything like that. So the product could officially come back to you and say, what the hell are you doing? Right. They could do. 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 name even some of the big companies that do that and say, you can't do that. But, but they don't. The, the Selenium group is a pretty. The people that manage the Selenium group are pretty good group of guys. So they don't. They don't mess with that. But from a product perspective, if you're on a product and you have certifications, that's, that's a huge. That was at Catalon. 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 outta 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, they'll want those people, those freshers, let's just put it that way, that just got out of school that, that learned that product and be able to put them into a, to a project almost immediately. Right. Because they 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.

Yep, for sure.

So anyway, it just sort of depends on the motion. If, you know, like if you're Shift Sync.

And you mentioned you have certifications for Tosca or something and Shift Sync, but the, you know, it's three grand to get certified in Tosca or something like that, it might not be such a helpful motion. Right, right.

For sure. For sure, Mike. So I want to switch gears really quick and then wrap things up. I. I guess the first one is maybe questions. Not meant to be controversial, but I do see it often. Should people still be learning Selenium or. You know, 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 than the other. I'm not saying one should use Playwright over Selenium. But what are your thoughts?

What are my thoughts? So, first of all, the Selenium user group is my largest group and I love the group. I'm in it every day. But, you know, I have a Cypress group, I have a Playwright group, I have a Test Cafe group. I have a. Oh, nice. Dallas User group. I have a Ginger group, I guess.

If you want to call that a group. I have a AI 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. So I, I'll give you an example and this isn't an ad or anything, but I was on BrowserStack's site, I downloaded and started using their codeless AI 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 test Grids automation tool learning it, seeing what it does well, what it doesn't do well. Last week I was also in Quality, that's Q U A l t I dot a I quality AI's tool learning how it works. And it's basically a plugin 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. You're 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. Right? A pet peeve of mine used to be that people would always go into imitation and say, okay, I recommend uft. And I was like, oh, okay. You know, so what other tools do you know that work on a desktop? I don't know any would be the answer. It was like, well, okay, that's not a true, that's a, that's a poor basis for a recommendation. Right? 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. Right. When you come into an organization, the first thing qa or 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.

Awesome. All right, Mike, before we go, is there one piece of actual advice other than the one you just gave us that someone could put into place right away around test automation or 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.

Oh, sure, if you're a, a test product company or a conference company too, I guess as well. You can always reach out to me, Mike Advisory. Com to color my hair rouge. So R O U G E Rouge advisory. And that's the way 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, you know, it's a moving environment. We're in it. Things are supposed to change, you know, and that doesn't mean that Selenium's bad or Playwright's good or Playwright's bad, and they both have some really, really, really good positives and they both have some sort of, some opportunities to work on. I don't know if you know Roy. Do you know Roy? But Roy presented just the other day a great ing framework for playwright. I played with that all day. Ingenious about two days ago. It was an awesome little framework. So. But you know, 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.

So, Mike, as you know, I run an online, annual online event called Automation Guild. This is going to be the ninth annual one coming up. I noticed you did submit 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 Gilt Community, what you might be presenting this year or.

Well, yeah, I, yeah, I did submit a talk to tescill, but it wasn't just me. I thought it would be interesting to have a round table discussion with just community folks talking about different experiences with communities. And it's, that's a wide group that could be a wide group of people that, that run communities. Right. And I.

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. So like we graciously mentioned my user group a number of times. But one strength of that user group is how easy it is for people to find it. Right. And that's why you have so much volume a lot of times in that group. One weakness is being there's a lot I can't do. Right. I don't really have CMS managing my group. Right. I can't even. The only way that I can email my group is from somebody that hasn't opt out of LinkedIn notifications. Right. But if you own that group and own that ip, there's a lot that more that you can do out of it. So 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. Like Ministry of Testing. Right. Doesn't have the greatest online presence in my opinion but they do really well at events in Europe. Right. And so everybody sort of has that niche on like where they're really good, you know, and, and maybe not so good. And anyway I thought, one thing I thought was really cool was our Star east conference.

Yeah.

And at our, our last Star East Conference, me and you and Philip and Leandro. Leandro. Who else was Andy?

Yep.

We're sitting in it just. And who else was Philip?

Did you mention Philip?

Maybe. Yeah. I don't know. But we all, we all sat around, started talking about different groups and, 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 it's after the fact. But I, I think it would be a neat conversation that give people a lot of direction and we didn't even, we even talked about Reddit a little bit in that group and nobody has a Reddit. None of those guys that I know of have Reddit groups. But that's a, you know, the different dynamics. So I, I think the 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 on up on top of my thing anymore. But I, I believe at least 85% said Test Guild was their, their preferential conference. And we named, because I can only use four companies on a poll we named three other companies and those three other were well known conferences and we put test Guild across those. So what to me what that tells me, Joe, is that at least on LinkedIn, our groups correlate in a lot of ways. Right.

Right.

Our groups talk to each other and measure each other. So but that. 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.

Awesome. And as we mentioned, Automation Guild's coming. It's the second week of February every year. So if you want to learn more, just go to automationguild.com, we'll have a link for it down below.

Thanks again for your Automation awesomeness. The links to everything of value we covered in this episode. Head on over to test guild.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. 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, join our vibrant community@testguild.com where you become part of our elite circle driving innovation in 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.

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 tests to showing the secret secrets to behold.