Solving Test Automation Challenges (2025 Guide) with Chris Trimper

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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, how the upcoming Automation Guild 2025 is addressing these challenges head on. I'm your host Joe Colantonio, and joining me today we have Chris Tripper, our tut skilled community leader, and today we'll be analyzing fresh survey data from hundreds of automation professionals in our community to understand the real challenges you're facing. Our 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 SDOTs leading the charge, each representing about 30% of respondents, with QA managers and leads rounding out the leadership roles. So 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 that 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 test failure debugging processes and turning to repeat manual test run verifications. Making it even more complex is the fragmented automation testing stack. But one has to hop onto multiple tools to help figure out test 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. Test 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 and 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 tests and new failures, and it can help you visualize test failures by test modules or folders. It also helps you debug failed tests faster utilizing AI, and some examples of this is it gives you failure reason categorization With AI based tagging you can use it to identify the unique areas that lead to the most test test failures, and it has timeline debugging with test logs and past test history in a single pane. It could also help you improve automation stability within 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 and 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 qualigate status into your CICD or SCM tooling. So click on the link down below and see test observability in action for yourself for your particular use case. Hey Chris, welcome to the Guild.

Hey Joe, thanks for having me back. I see we have the similar place that we go shopping at. You know you gotta represent, right?

All right, very cool. It's great to see you look great in the Guild colors as well. And as I mentioned, Chris, you've been the community leader pretty much since we started unofficially, and now you are officially. So thank you for all you do for the community. I really do appreciate it.

No, it's a blast. Thanks for having me.

Absolutely. So Chris, you know, I just wanted to go over really quickly to give people some insight into what Automation Guild is and, you know, how we create it, and then maybe go over some of the sessions that are going to help them. So I thought it'd be kind of cool to go over some of the survey results. Every year I run a an annual survey to our community and ask them what the number one thing is that they're struggling with. And then based on that information, we find sessions and speakers to fulfill those things that they say that they need to learn more about. So I guess looking at these results, we have three main themes that came out maybe four. But the first one is Tests Maintenance headaches. This is probably a theme we see every year, but a lot of survey respondents really consistently cite maintenance as the top challenge because they all say they struggle with flaky tests and reliability issues. And it's a bunch of time sync of updating tests for dynamic UI changes. Now, I was laid off five years ago, so I haven't been hands on like you are, Chris. So is this still something you're seeing as well?

Oh man, it's still a headache. I mean, between code changes and certainly for all of our developer friends out there, I'm not dogging 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, developee terms that I don't totally know. There's an immense amount of reasons in which our tests 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, geez, when you're talking about mobile apps, you know, the vendors will throw us a loop all the time. You know, new iOS update, new Android update. All of a sudden Samsung thinks and sorry, I'm not picking on anyone, but all of a sudden they think that something new needs to happen in the experience. All of a sudden it's like, whoa, 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, you know, 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 cruft of things like regression that we don't want to have to do a full manual regression every time so we can do it in 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.

Chris, is this like one of those unsolvable problems? Do you think this will be with us to the end of time?

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 we can get past them. So 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, you know, instead of it taking 5 hours, this sprint, 10 hours next sprint, 15 hours, next sprint. We want to kind of keep it at bay. So we want to do intelligent things to maintain things. But you know, 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 in this because it's like, you know what? I want to make sure that the button's red every time. And every time we do a deploy, I want to make sure that that button's red. 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. So, you know, from a person who likes to solve problems, it's fun. 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. So I think there just might be a couple of things in this year's guild that really address that number one problem.

Absolutely. We're going to dive in that soon. I just want to go over 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 the problem. Number one, which is test maintenance and a bunch of other issues. I guess the second issue, which has 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. So you have 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 to mock services, maybe third party that you don't have in your environment. So there's a lot of complexity going on nowadays, I think with modern software development.

So yeah, Joe, I mean, you're talking about all these complex environments. So let's just take services as an example. You know, services are something that nobody ever wanted to touch. Like, oh, I don't want to test these services. They're so complicated. And then we finally get used to them and I'll take you down the journey that I went through. So SOAP services, yes, people are cringing about that now. I know we've gotten past that. But you know, you had your SOAP service, you're like, oh, I finally tackled this. I have services that are sending and returning xml. It's great. JSON. What, what's that JSON thing? What's this REST thing? And then you're just, oh, so complexity. You're talking about complexity. You just finally start understanding REST services. And then there's restful services. I'm like, ahu, what do you mean we went to rest, to something more and then you had to figure out that and now we have microservices. So it's just an example of how something small, a service, can continue growing and change and 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 so I'm going to pimp up communities all I can. That's why we need these communities and 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 gauge them on, you know, what books they use, what websites they use, who they follow, but if they kind of look at me with like those, you know, stare 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. You know, 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 tests that are things that go on and off people's radar all the time. That is definitely a, a level of complexity in addition. So yeah, they're going to keep getting more complex. I couldn't even possibly predict what complexities are coming in 2025, 2026 and et cetera. But you need a way to stay current so that you can be prepared for these sorts of things.

100% agree with you, Chris, Especially as I get older. I don't think we would have survived in this industry if we didn't stay current. And I just, that's one of the reason why I started Test Guild and Automation Guild because for myself there was, 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. All right. And the third challenge I saw, and this has always been, once again, is buy in and team collaboration. So a lot of people mentioned getting team buy in for animation initiatives is 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 seems, I'm sure to be miscommunication. So any thoughts on buy in and team collaboration issues?

Oh yeah, I Mean, you know, you're talking about buy in for automation initiatives. Sometimes there's this buy in of for a project that comes up trying to justify the automation resources for it or justify whether or not you're going to have automation. And then, you know, there's a lot of conversations that come in and that even, you know, jumps to that third point that you made about ROI where you know, you're kind of doing this song and dance of is it worth it? Is not worth it. You kind of feel like, am I that, you know, 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 know, you talk about buy in, sometimes there's just buy in for a strategy, you know, 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, you know, 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. You know, 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, in a group where you have these almost, you know, 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 by. You know, definitely collaboration is key. You know, I know so many of us work from home. I work remote myself. But that's not an excuse to not, you know, be in touch with others and to not do that. Certainly it's an absolute key. And, and you know, sometimes you need to watch some trainings or see other people's experience to realize, oh, there's that technique or there's this way that I can collaborate with that other group that I just didn't realize before an roi. I mean, does anybody have a perfect ROI calculator? Probably not thinking about that buy in. You know, 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.

Absolutely. And you know, Chris, a good point you just brought up is having a community to go to to to actually find out how they got buy in or team collaboration. I know a lot of times what I love about Automation Guild is someone may 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. So if you have a question like, hey, how did you get buy in for that technique? How to get buy in for that tool or solution, you can ask those type of questions, live with these experts and get their feedback, which I think is kind of unique as well.

Yeah, no, it certainly is. Especially because not only, you know, the kind of neat thing about the guild, and I'm not saying this is what you should be doing all the time, is while a session's 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 pass a secret note to the person three seats down from 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's 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. Not every presentation of 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 decisions you need to make today, but can help you shape your decisions for the future.

Absolutely. And I don't think we could get to the sessions, but without first talking about AI. I know I see a lot of things on LinkedIn like people are sick of AI, but based on our survey results, it was the number one requested topic in our survey. And it's all kinds of AI they want to know more about. AI enabled open source using AI for better defect reporting, AI integration with existing frameworks, practical applications for the daily task. A bunch of different things with AI. I think I'm in the minority here. I think AI is actually under Underplayed or under hype might just be me. Because I know you have strong opinions with AI as well. But yeah. Any thoughts?

I think a lot of it, I think a lot of it comes to, you know, if you go back, geez Joe, I can't even figure if it was eight 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 it, I don't know what 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, well, 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. So now instead of, you know, this is kind of an X factor for, you know, what we're doing and I want to turn this into a math example. But you know, if I'm sitting here doing work, but at the same time four other people are doing work about AI things, well then in the same amount of time that I did work, I get to be spoon fed in a very wonderful fashion all 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.

Absolutely. And a unique thing I'm adding to the shares event is when you get the five day ticket, I have an AI bot that's going to be trained just on the speaker sessions in the live Q and A and all the documents. So throughout the year you'll have access to it and you can interact with it and get, hey, give me a summary of what Scott Moore talked about or what are the top questions asked at this year's event just to help almost act like a coach. So we like to say it's not just an online event, it's not a one done event. You get community before, during and after the event is over and you get access to all the recordings and also the spot that's going to be trained specifically on just that content so you can get the quick bits throughout the time. So if you're working two months later and you're like, oh, I'm struggling with this, I heard something at Automation Skill, I forgot what it was, you could just query that bot and hopefully should get you information you need quickly as well.

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, you know, throughout the year you're like, hey, I remember that thing, but I don't remember enough about it, you know. 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 bot'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, that's a really cool thing.

Awesome. And definitely, like I said, people can give it a try. By joining the Automation Guild this year, by going to automation guild.com by the five day ticket, you get access to that. And I feel like this is a telethon. This is like the only time of year I actually ask anyone to go and spend money on a ticket. But I think it's, it's to benefit them. It's not just for the, for the test guild. We create it to try to be a 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, the joint Automation Guild get to interact with a unique speaker that they voted for as well throughout the year. So it's not just five days. Every month we have a new training as well. Based on what people said, hey, I'm struggling with this this month. Could we get a speaker to fill in for this? And we try to do that as well.

Yeah, I mean for, geez, almost pennies a session. I mean you're, you're seeding the ability for these speakers to come together, the platform to do it because you know, sadly not anything is just free anymore. So 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. 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 pick a person, Speaker X is talking about a thing, and it's not until tomorrow that you remember the question you want to 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 waiting 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 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 to have a plane delayed and disappoint your family for being late. You're just there.

Absolutely. And this is going to be our ninth annual event. So we just didn't start this up.

Way before it was trendy.

We'll call it 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. Yeah. Right, Chris. So like you mentioned, I thought let's connect some of these challenges with specific sessions maybe at the Shares Automation Guild. So I guess maybe stop maybe with test maintenance challenges or things like that. Because the first one that pops in my head is, you know, one of the main things also we heard a lot from is I know we don't a lot of people ask for help with Playwright because it seems to be a growing trend and more and more folks using it. Not saying it's better than any other framework or it's a tool that's going to. It's better than any other, but it just seems to be a growing trend.

It's the current new kid on the block that everybody's interested about. We'll call it that.

Absolutely. And we also like to say, even if a session's about say like Firmware X, say it's about Selenium or Playwright on Cypress, doesn't matter. You can take things away from that and apply it to your existing tool as well. So if not using Playwright and use Selenium, I'm sure there's a lot of things or 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 that I know a lot of people struggle with. So that's one that definitely caught my eye for. For test maintenance or challenges like that.

Yeah, no, that one definitely looks pretty good. And again, you're 100% correct. Where, you know, just because they're going to be talking about a particular tooling, 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. So 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 vice 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 a web project that I have as well.

All right, Chris, I don't want to go off on a rant here, but I maybe because it's my agent, I start off with vendor tools. Vendors speak with a lot of customers, a lot of different verticals. It's not like they're 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. So I'm pretty sure that they speak in a lot of diverse companies and technologies, know ways to work around things that Swan 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 a tool, but. Right. Am I wrong here? Am I going off the rails?

No, not at all. Anytime 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 10 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 to solve problems. You know, I think back to any time that you have new people come into a company that you work with and they say, gosh, I'm not over promoting myself. I'm just speaking facts like, gosh, how do you know all that stuff? I'm like, I've 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 does come from the problems that I find. But let's face it, it's all about the experiences. The experiences help shape who we are. And, you know, 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.

And along the same kind of trend here is 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. So I think that's going to help, I think, address a lot of issues people may have with flaky tests and maintenance issues, hopefully.

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. So.

Anna, thank you, thank you for that. I cannot wait for the tongue twisters on that day. But seriously. Yeah, exactly. I mean, all these things are transferable. You know, we shouldn't be thinking that we're also overly unique with the one, you know, corner that we're in doing automation. You know, we're talking about things like selectors and locators. I know that's a hot topic. It's been a hot topic for all since selectors and locators became a notion. Web is web is web. I'm just going to say it and I know a lot of people will 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 100%.

And so I know a lot of people are struggling trying to learn more about AI. So we have, we have a fair amount of sessions on air. 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 Auburn talking about end to end automation leveraging AI. So he's going to touch on a lot of topics using AI test data. He's going to use it, you know, real world examples. I think he's going to test against the Automation Guild site or the Test Guild site and it's going to be really practical hands on implementation of AI. That's just one of many sessions but that is one that stands out to me. I think that people are going to get value from.

Oh 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 someday. Right. He's going to be perpetually steps ahead of us in the realm of AI because of his mission and his cause. So 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. You know, people should be clamoring at sessions like that to say Jason, you know, what area should I be focusing on? The world of AI is so confusing. Help me, you know, figure out where to focus and to have this practical hands on end to end automation technique, you know, provided by him is going to be fantastic. I'm certainly looking forward to that as well.

Yeah. And it's actually followed up by the same day. Lee Barnes is going to be talking about non deterministic systems. I know a lot of people have been saying how do I test a system now that's out of my control, it's non deterministic. Where before we're used to this and that, how do you do that? So I think Lee Bonds brings a lot, a lot of experience as a consultant with many, many Companies I'm really excited about also.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I would say for the most part, unless your company is technology adverse, this is something that we're all going to hit someday. Whether it's this year, 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, and this is one of those seeds that hopefully gets planted in everyone so that you're like, ah, I'm thankful for that seed. I now have a clean of hope of how to do that thing.

Absolutely. And I guess once again, along those lines, I think you're going to pick up a lot of tips also for the session from David Burns. David Burns has been a thought leader in automation, especially Selenium, for years. He's one of the first, I thought, like online famous people I met once at a conference, I'm like, oh, 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.

I wonder if he's going to call me a flake. I wonder if I'm 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, ah, I just got to abandon this and start over when. When that might not be the case. So I think he can save lots of headaches from, from people with that. That's going to be awesome.

Absolutely. And I also try to choose a lot of sessions that, you know, we like technical, but we also like not soft skills, but it's more like 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 impressive.

That caught my attention for two reasons. One, I mean, she spoke to our hearts by saying, debugging your career. Ooh, you know, how I hacked my way. You know, that definitely just makes it sound a little bit devious and totally Getting into our wheelhouse. But you know, to go from QA to cto, unless, of course, you know, 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. And the soft skills of learning this kind of technique or showing people a door is just wonderful.

Absolutely. And also what I think is, unfortunately a lot of people are going through changes in their career, let's say. And so Robert has a really good session. He was recently laid off. He was hired, I think, also recently. But he's doing a session on laid off. Now what do I do? Which I think is going to help a lot of people. I was laid off five years ago. Still technically laid off. But I'm really curious to know what Robin recommends doing in this situation.

No, I, I applaud Robert for, you know, having the guts to come out and talk about this one. A lot of people, you know, 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 are a place where you can turn maybe what you thought is a negative into a positive and turn it around. So, yeah, no, 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 getting laid off is something that's never pleasant. But hopefully Robert gives us a little ray of sunshine or opportunities to brighten our day.

Absolutely. And what I like about the end of day three is we're going to have a roundtable with Richard Bradshaw, Mike Lyles and Vernon Richards to go over, basically, you know, 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, it's the famous Maxwell. I forgot his first. John Maxwell, I think, writes a ton of books and he actually works for that company and he's officially trained, so he's going to 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 three day ticket, how they can take what they learned and actually implement it throughout the rest of the year.

Yeah, no, 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 Ah, so there's this area I wasn't thinking about that, you know, 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.

Absolutely. And so that's. There's a three day ticket and a five day ticket. The five day ticket also includes, like I said, the AI Joe Bot for Automation Guild, also two workshops and topics outside of just functional automation. So we have topics about performance testing, security testing for quality engineers. We have sessions on creating a test in ecosystem, understanding observability, running your tests in Kubernetes, building a global accessibility testing framework, Selenium Manager, how to dockerize your test, bunch of other tests, DevPerf Ops, which is a new thing that's got more 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. So that's the last two days and I think that adds a lot of topics a 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 pliable as well.

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, so you know, we hear things about security and performance, we're like, oh, 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 that's what 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. They're 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, wait, what do you mean by that? And instead know it already, that's just going to be fantastic.

Absolutely. So, as I mentioned in the beginning, the survey shows that we're all facing similar challenges. But I think automation 2025 is going to bring together experts who've solved these exact problems and they're here to help you. So we highly recommend, if you haven't already, register for Automation Guild handed over using the link down below. Whether you're struggling with test maintenance, complex architecture, AI integration, API testing, all the things in automation, we're going to try to cover cicd. These sessions are designed specifically for your needs and what you told 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?

Yeah. Sign up today.

Absolutely.

Never stop. Never stop learning. And the best way to never stop learning is, is to allow yourself to suck things in like a sponge. And sign up at the guild because you will not regret it. Guaranteed.

Love it. All right, so that's it for this episode of the Test Guild Automation Podcast. Once again, I'm Joe. I'm just help you succeed in 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 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 hoots and lyres, the bards began their song A tune of knowledge, a melody of code through the air it's spread like wildfire through the land Guiding tester showing the secrets to behold.