Selenium Love Letter and Book with Joe Colantonio

Get ready to discover the most actionable end to end automation advice for some of the smartest testers on the planet. Hey, I'm Joe Calantonio, host of the Test Guild Automation Podcast and my goal is to help you succeed with creating Automation awesomeness.

Hey, it's Joe and welcome to another episode of the Test Guild Automation Podcast. And today I want to share with you some recordings I did at the on site event for Selenium Comp in Chicago. Oh gosh, it's been at least two months ago now already. But what I've done is before each interview I asked everyone, what does Selenium mean to you? And I chopped them all up. I got all those answers and I put them together. So we have multiple different speakers and you're going to recognize a lot of the folks that showed up. I think you're going to get a lot of value from it. I'm calling this a love letter to Selenium or a Selenium love letter. But before we get to it, if you haven't heard already, I released a new book. It is automation awesomeness 260 actionable affirmations to improve your QA and automation testing skill. So in this book, my hope is that you get inspired. There's some insights of some of the smartest testers I've had the privilege to interview over nine years on my Test Guild podcast, which used to be Test Talks. My goal is that you glean an actual tip tool, best practice or mindset every business day that you can apply to your daily software testing and career. So it's drawn from over 600 interviews conducted over nine years. We've distilled the best of the best bite size, actionable daily advice. Your benefit. So I know a lot of you don't have a lot of time. So what I've done is I split this out into one page represents one day in a typical business day. So there's over 260 actual pieces of advice and all you need to do is go in every business day before you start and all you need to do is just read the quote from the expert speaker. Once you do that, underneath it I have an actual piece of advice to ponder or think about to say okay, after you read this quote, here are some suggestions we recommend. And we also left some space for you to jot down your thoughts. So we highly recommend you get the physical copy of the book. The Kindle version is also available. We'll have an ebook available probably in 90 days or so, and also an audiobook. But Right now we have a Amazon Kindle version which can be read on basically any ebook reader. Also we have a paperback version and a hardback version available on Amazon right now and all you need to do is go to test guild.com getbook and it'll take you directly there. AMD Forward is also by the one and only Angie Jones. Also, this book is really a unique blend of motivational affirmations and practical advice for professionals and enthusiasts looking to strengthen their automation and testing skills by combining the power of positive thinking with actual steps. I really aim to inspire you to excel in your career in person projects. So if you're sticking a book with extensive technical content and code samples that's going to be out of date in a year or so, this book is not for you. I try to make this as evergreen as possible with principles discussed in this book that are going to be applicable to both technical and non technical aspects of software testing process and automation, and the emphasis is placed on primarily the development of soft skills as they relate to automation testing. I wanted to create a resource that you could use every workday. Hence 260 quotes is usually 260 business days in a typical average year, depending on factors such as weekends, public holidays and the number of work hours per week. And I think it's a great way to kickstart your day and ensure that you're focused and motivated to tackle your toughest software testing challenges. Naturally, not all the advice in the book will resonate with you, but that's okay. Take what works for you and ignore the rest. And as always, test everything and keep the good Grab the book. All you need to do is go to testguild.com forward/getbook and if you already have the book, if you read the book, I highly recommend you leave a review. If you haven't already. Reviews really help. Again, the word out that the book's available and I really think this book is going to help a lot of people. I already had a few companies tell me that buying it for their interns and they're having book clubs around it. So if you have the book and you haven't left a review, if you can really help me out and go to test skill.com forward/book review that'll take you directly to the section in Amazon to review the book. So that's test skill.com forward/book review. And for everyone that has left a review, thank you so much. So here's a few Eileen wrote I was delighted to find this book. The quotes here are one a day in this generous amount of wisdom in a short format is keeping me both motivated motivated and the guidance to where to go next. Another reviewer wrote. This book is pure gold for any test automation engineer who wishes to either get started with a specific area and test frameworks or enhance existing skills. This collection of expert tips in this book is unmatched and would offer useful information for many years to come. Ian Ricci also wrote on new test automation and this book is a gold mine. So thank you everyone for your reviews. If you haven't checked it out, please check it out. To get the book, go to test guild.com forward/getbook. And to leave a review, go to test guild.com forward/reviewbook. Right now, here's our love letter to Selenium. Check it out. All right, welcome everyone. We're streaming here from Selenium Conf 2023. We have our very first guest. Really excited. Have been speaking with Subject 7 for about a year now. We had them on a few webinars, so this is the first time actually meeting someone from Subject seven face to face. So, Chris, good to have you. Great. Thanks for having us. Awesome. So before we get into it, just curious to know, I'm going to ask everyone this question. What does Selenium mean to you? Yeah, it's a great question. I think quality is one of the big things, you know, like for us, you know, so we have an automation tool. Right. And so when our founders were looking at, you know, tools that were going to kind of under the hood, run our website of our testing, they really did a lot of research to see, like, what's going to be the best, you know, the best quality for our customers and for their software ultimately. Right. And we really needed, you know, reliability, those types of things. So Selenium is really kind of the base, you know, for our company. Like, we kind of started out in web and now, you know, we obviously have other tools that do desktop and that kind of stuff. But for our website that, you know, Selenium is running it under the hood and it has allowed us to give our customers the tools to really have quality software.

Hey, welcome back to the Selenium Conf Backstage live stream. We have special treat with you the creator of WebDriver himself, Simon Stewart. Welcome, Simon. Hello. Welcome. Thank you. Good to have you. Good to have you. Lovely to be here. So I'm asking everyone this question because I'm gonna make like a podcast called Love Letter to Selenium. I'm gonna take what they say to this question and is, what does Selenium mean to you? Oh, wow. It's been a key and fundamental part of my life and professional career for well over a decade.

I pushed the first code, like on a Christmas holiday in 2007, like 3rd of January, sitting on my sofa with a glass of red wine, thinking, like, oh, this will be over fairly soon. Like six months. Six months and we'll be done. And sure enough, 13 years later, we're still not quite finished. And just seeing how that thing has taken off and exploded has been phenomenal. Absolutely. And I've met so many, so many good people, good friends, had so many good experiences. Like, I don't know how to articulate it. More succumb to than that. Absolutely. All right, welcome back. I went to the Selenium backstage livestream and look who I grabbed, the one and only Andy Knight. Welcome, Andy. Thank you so much, Joe. Good to be here. Good to have you. So exciting things going on in the automation industry, especially with applitools. Before we get into it though, I want to ask, what does Selenium mean to you, man? What does Selenium mean to me? I mean, Selenium was the first browser automation tool that I used. It's how I got into web testing. I've used it for years. It's really cool because it's open source, open standards, open governance. That's why I'm so honored to be here at Selenium conference as a speaker. Absolutely love it. Hey, welcome back, everyone to the Selenium Conf backstage back scenes kind of live stream we have with us finally after, I don't know, six years or some, Titus is on the show. Welcome, Titus. Thank you, thank you. Great to have you. Before we get into it now, I'm asking on this question, what does Selenium mean to you, man? Such a great question because I've started using selenium when Selenium 2 came out, when Webdriver kind of was integrated into Selenium. And then I joined the Selenium project as a developer in 2015. So I've been doing that for almost eight years now. And I've been one of the most active contributors the last year and a half. So it's just been a very.

Obviously, I'm very attached to Selenium and its success and I think Selenium is.

It's the participation in the open web that's probably the most important thing to me. Like we're trying to be good stewards of the open web and trying to be collaborative and open and focus on ecosystem. Love it. And I was just speaking to Simon Stewart and he said that's one of the unique things about this project. It really is collaborative, kind of of a group effort. So you feel the same way as well.

And yeah, it's a friendly group of people. It's really nice to. It was easy to stay involved because I just enjoyed being around it. The people I don't know. I tweeted earlier. I'm just like. I forget just how much I genuinely enjoy being around the people in this community. And so this conference is so great to see people in person have the conversations and just enjoy that. Nice. All right, welcome back to the Selenium Conf Backstage live stream. We have with us the one and only Doc OTS Wizard. Welcome, Paul. Hey. Hi, Joe. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm so happy to be back here and hanging out here. It's been a while, so it's awesome. Paul's been a frequent guest on the podcast, so it's the first time we actually met in person. He more than lived up to the awesome hype, as he also travels with his hat, so.

So, Paul, what I ask everyone before we start is, what does Selenium mean to you? So what Selenium means to me is that I've got a solid framework that allows me to interact and test in a lot of different areas. Functional testing, obviously. You got API that you can throw in there. You can do testing in multiple browsers, operating systems. It also gives me an opportunity to go experiment and do some really crazy stuff with it. So that's what it means to me. Hey, welcome back to the Slam Cop Backstage live stream. We're here with Robin, finally. Hey, Robin. Welcome to the live stream. Thank you so much. Awesome. So good to have you. I thought. Before we jump in, I'm asking everyone this question. What does Selenium mean to you? Wow, that's a deep question. Yeah, it's like, what does air mean to you? Right. So Selenium means a lot of things for me. Community software, place for me to go and code when I'm not managing people. And obviously, it's like a hammer, like the Thor's hammer, which could be used to defeat the bugs and the villains out there, or maybe to automate some mundane tasks, like how Jason started the whole project. Right, Right. Awesome. And we're back at the Selenium Conf Backstage live stream, and I have a special. Two special guests for you today. Appium experts Sai and Srini that are going to go over a bunch of different things. But I guess to kick things off, as always, I'm going to ask each of you, what does Selenium mean to you? Let's start with these. It means all to me because when I started as A QA probably 11 years back, selenium was the one which helped me red and button. So definitely it's all of it. And I think this is my sixth year in the Selenium Conf and I'm really enjoying it. I always look forward for Selenium Conf. Yeah, yeah. How about you, Srini? Yeah. The organization that I work for is ThoughtWorks. I came to know about, I mean ThoughtWorks through selenium. So it means a life to me. Awesome. Hey, welcome to day two of Selenium Conf. Really excited to have you on the stream. We have our first speaker of the day. We have Ben going over his session and a bunch of different things. Before we get into it, what does Selenium meet you? Oh, hello everyone. Selenium means a lot to me. It basically started my career. I worked as a developer before I got into testing and Selenium was the first thing I tried out with the applications I was doing and I was fascinated by it. So from that on, I wanted to go into testing. Nice. Hey, welcome back everyone to the Selenium Backstage livestream. I'm really excited. I finally got some Meet the creator of Selenium based Face to Face after all these years. Welcome to the Selenium Comp Backstage live stream. Hey, Joe, it's great to be here. Awesome. Before we get into it, I asked everyone this question is what does Selenium mean to you? Well, Selenium is the whole world to me because I started my career early on in web automation. So I joined a company called HubSpot. They said, Go learn Selenium. So I started learning all that and then building out a framework and in order to make Selenium more simplified because the raw selenium bindings are a bit raw and not reliable unless you have weights added in to make sure that an element is fully there before you start clicking or interacting with it. All right. Oh, there. Everyone's clapping for Karina Pip here. Yes, Karina's in the house. Karina, welcome to the Selenium Comp Backstage livestream. Good morning. How are you? Good to see you. I guess. Before we get started, I'm asking everyone this question. What does Selenium mean to you? So Selenium is basically one of the tools I've been using for over 10 years now. So it's kind of something I specialized in and something that I really, really enjoy doing at work and talking about on my blog. And, you know, I've also created a kind of a small library based on Selenium recently. So it's something that I enjoy both at work and also for fun. So. But as I mentioned to Joe earlier yesterday, somebody also asked this question at a talk, and somebody said that Selenium is my bread. And I think that's a very, very nice answer. So I'll stick with that. Awesome. Yeah, I love it. Hey, welcome back to the Selenium Comp backstream live stream. Really here. Excited to be with Diego. He did an excellent keynote to kick things off. So, Diego, welcome. Thank you, Joe. Thank you for having me and thank you for being here. Absolutely. So I'm asking everyone this question. First one is, what does Selenium mean to you? Oh, Selenium for me means having constant contact with the community, having the possibility to exchange ideas, to collaborate, and just to work together to have some nice environment, nice tools to help us work and have a better automation, testing industry and community. Yeah. All right. Welcome back to the Selenium Conf livestream. I'm really excited. I finally got to meet Karen in person after following her for a few years now, so. Hey, Karen, welcome to the stream. Hi. I'm happy to be here. Joe. Awesome. Awesome to have you. So I know you were a little on the fence about doing this, and I think you had some sort of epiphany that you mentioned to me. Before we get into that epiphany, though, the first question I want to ask you is, what does Selenium mean to you? Well, my answer will have changed between when I first arrived at the conference and now, because Selenium rings an awful lot closer to community than it did for me before, because before I just thought of it as a tool and now I see all of these people that are involved in the open source commitment and the commitment to community is really important to me. Absolutely. I love that. All right, welcome back to the Slam Comp backstage live stream. Really excited. I finally got to meet Naomi live in person after, like, I don't know, 10 years. Oops. So.

You were so excited that everything dropped there. Everyone's excited to hear about this. So welcome to the stream. Thank you. Awesome. Thanks for having me. Great to see you and finally meet you in person. Really excited. I guess before we get into what you talked about at your session.

First question I'm asking everyone is what does Selenium mean to you? So to me, Selenium means saving time because it means helping with automation. It also means community. Selenium community is amazing and this conference and everything that's going on here proves it, right? So for me it's yeah, those are the two main things that Selenium would mean to me. Hey, welcome everyone to the Selenium Conf Backstage live stream. Really excited. I just pulled someone in to do a random interview, so don't know we're going to talk about yet. So, Bonnie, welcome to the stream. Thank you. Awesome. So I'm asking everyone this question before we get started is what does Selenium mean to you? Well, Selenium from mates, a very important part of my career because I did a PhD dissertation which was focused on test automation. I started using Selenium remote control at that time. After that I continue using WebDriver. After that I create my own projects like WebDriver Manager and now I'm part of the project. I'm a commuter, so yeah, it's for me it's a great tool and it's all open source and it means a lot. Hey, it's Joe. Welcome back to the Slam Comp Backstage live stream. Really excited to have us with the one and only Marcus. Welcome, Marcus. Thank you very much. Good to be here. Cool to have you. I guess I'd like to start off with just ask you, what does Selenium mean to you? I think Selenium to me means the democratization of Test UI test. I mean, it started off my career as these really, really, really super expensive tools made by giant companies who may or may not have cared or been able to respond to my little support requests. But Selenium means open source. It means scale without huge cost. And I can fix problems myself if they arise. So it enables me to have a career without having to go through procurement for every single thing I want to do. Hey, welcome back to another Backstage exclusive. We have the folks from Case joining us today. Emily. So, Emily, welcome. Thank you, Joe. Happy to be here. A little last minute and ironically I'm probably one of our least technical people on the team, but happy to be here at Selenium Conference and learning so much from everybody attending. Awesome. Yeah, love it, love it. So I guess before we get started, since you are maybe new, just curious to know your thoughts on what Selenium means to you. Yeah, so I actually, I'm in customer success. I've done pretty much everything on the business side and I'm not actually an engineer myself, but I know for our team, Selenium has been kind of a great starter tool. It's got a great community. I mean, just being at the conference here today and getting to have great conversations with people and learn the history of Selenium, the collaboration that's gone into it, I think just community in one word is kind of the big takeaway that I've had personally and for our team as well. Just a great starting point, a great kind of core base series of tools that people can use. Hey, welcome everyone to the Selenium Conf Backstage live stream once again, where we have the folks from Tricentis here. Really excited to have you all join us today.

Thanks for having us. So I guess before we get into it, I've been asking everyone this question. What does Selenium mean to you, especially as a vendor? I don't know. What is the relationship with Selenium? Yeah. So with Selenium, it's a really great solution when it comes to test automation, especially in the testing space. It's open source, it's easily accessible, everyone is using it. Right. And the footprint it has, especially in the testing community, it's great. And it helped pave the path when it comes to test automation. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think here at this conference it's been eye opener for me just to interact with a lot of my customers, Tricentis customers, but they're all using Selenium as well and they're super interested in automation. Right, right. And just trying to figure out how and what are the best ways to go about doing that. Absolutely. All right, welcome back everyone to the Selenium Backstage live stream. And I'm here with my favorite open source contributor of all time, Manoj Kumar. Welcome, Manoj. Nice to be here. Thanks, Joe. Great to have you. Great chat. I know you've been really busy, so thank you for stopping by. There's a lot of things I want to go over, but the first thing I want to know is what does Selenium mean to you? It's a big question. I have a long story to talk about, but I'll make it short, very short, like a sentence is what am I doing today? Where am I today? Is all because of Selenium, because it has been earning the bread and butter, has been there forever, since I started my career. So it means all to me. All right, welcome everyone to the Slimkopf behind the scenes live stream. Really excited to have with us. Igor joining us. Welcome to the stream. Thank you, Joel. Finally. Finally. Awesome. So I've known Igor for a while, so really excited to have him on the show. I'm surprised we don't even have a podcast or anything. So this is my time to get him documented on tape live. So a big round of applause for Igor as we jump into it, I guess before we get into it, what does Selenium mean to you? Since this is Selenium Conf, if it does mean anything to you, what is it? Selenium, Joe, means a lot for me. It does, yeah. It does indeed. It's one of the first automation framework I ever used in my career back in 2011 when Simon Stewart released that 2.0. I used it from day one in combination with Java, then when I made in Expedia, I use it in combination with Ruby and Cucumber. So yeah, I use it for a while and then later years, not that much. I'm more like in a Cypress world. But I still think Selenium is there. It's under heavy development, new releases coming, so it's a big framework for this community. That's why I'm here. I have with us the creator of Serenity, js, the main contributor, Jan. So really excited to have him here joining us. Thank you for joining us. Hello everyone. Thank you for having me. It's amazing, awesome, awesome. Great to finally meet you live. You know, we've spoken of many times on the phone, but it's the first time meeting face to face. So this has been an awesome experience for me. So thank you. I think. Before we get into it, I've been asking everyone this question is what does Selenium mean to you? That's a funny one because now, to many people, Selenium is a library, right? You use something, you automate your tests. But to me, it's something slightly different. So to me, Selenium is a community, a bunch of people that you can rely on, that you can have a conversation with, that you can use their help to build your own tools, your own frameworks. And I think that's the most helpful part from my perspective of the Selenium project as this. From the tooling perspective, Selenium is a platform, really. So it's a thing you can use to build something of your own, some framework, some test automation suite and so on. Really excited about this one. We covered it on the Test Guild News Show a while back. This new ide, if you're an automation engine, you want to stick around, hear all about it. Before we get into it, guys, maybe introduce each of you and let it go. Oscar yeah, my name is Oscar. I'm from JetBrains. We're working in the Aqua, the new IDE for test automation. And I'm Ilya, I'm a software engineer in Aqua. Just. Yeah, working on it. Sweet, sweet. I guess before we get into what Aqua is and why all the buzz is all about, maybe because we are Selenium Conference. What does Selenium mean to you? I don't know if you have any background with it or as a vendor. What does it mean to you? Yeah, so. Okay, okay, okay, so let me, let me go for it. Selenium, like Selenium for us is first of all is a complete infrastructure for test automation and UI testing. And for us it means that we have to do less work because like Selenium infrastructure already includes every tool that you might possibly need. So there is Selenite, there is webdriver, there is Selenium Grid, all sorts of stuff. And what it actually gives to the user and our customers is like complete support. He doesn't have to invent the wheel, he just has everything out of the box. He just needs to go there and hide his tests. And for us it means that we have less staff to support. And yeah, I think as a Jetpens, we have many other ideas. Our main goal for all our products is to make the developer or the tester more efficient. So we try to make smart products that they can help you in your development.

Thanks again for your automation awesomeness. The links to everything of value we covered in this episode, head on over to testguild.com a451 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, thanks again for listening. If you're not already part of our awesome community of 27,000 of the smartest testers, DevOps and automation professionals in the world, we'd love to have you join the fam at Test Guilds. And if you're in the DevOps Automation software testing space, or you're a test tool provider and want to offer real world value that can improve the skills or solve a problem for the guild community, I'd love to hear from you. Head on over to test guild.info and let's make it happen.