The Three Test Automation Game Changers with Annalisa Camarillo and Amin Vidur

Welcome to the Test Guild Automation Podcast where we all get together to learn more about automation and software testing with your host, Joe Calantonio.

Hey, it's Joe. And welcome to another episode of the Test Guild Automation Podcast. And today we'll be talking with Lisa and Vitor all about the three test automation game changers. I've been in the game for over almost 25 years and as you're going to find out, Lisa and Vitor also have been in the industry for a while. So there's a lot of common themes we see over and over again that causes issues with teams choosing the right automation tools and a bunch of other things. So it's going to be a great episode. If you don't know. Lisa is a hands on Silicon Valley marketing executive with over 20 years of experience succeeding in brand content and product marketing for high growth software companies and startups. She actually specializes in turning content and digital marketing into lead generation acceleration business growth. She's also a Chief Marketing Officer at AVA Automation, a global leader in automation solutions where she leads a team of marketing professionals. She's also very technical, so she has a great point of view from both sides of the fence I think you're really going to enjoy. And then we also have Vitor who is the CEO of EVO Automation. He believes in building high performance, self motivating teams that deliver one goal and that is making automation simple, intelligent and resilient. And with automation being the linchpin that triggers digital transformations, he actually firmly asserts that a quality assurance system is more important than ever for organizations to reimage the way they do business. So a lot of great stuff here, you don't want to miss it. Check it out.

The Test Guild Automation Podcast is sponsored by the fantastic folks at Source Labs, the cloud based test platform that helps ensure you can develop with confidence at every step from code to deployment. For every framework, browser, OS, mobile device and API, get a free trial. Visit testskill.comsourcelabs and click on the exclusive sponsor section to try it for free today. Check it out. Hey Lisa Invader. Welcome to the Guild.

Yeah, thanks for having us.

Hey Joe, good to be here.

Awesome, awesome. Great to have you back on the show. First time on the show I actually was on your podcast which I'll have a link in the show notes and that's where we started talking about a bunch of different things and that's where this topic actually came up out of. So before we get into it though, is there anything I missed in either of your bios that you want the Guild to know more about.

I think you covered it. It was quite a mouthful, but you covered it all right.

Awesome.

Yeah, I think you did a good job, Joe. Really appreciate having us on the show.

Great to have you. And so, you know, before the show we had a pre show and we talked about some of the challenges a lot of teams face. And we came up to like three main buckets that we think a lot of people struggle with. So I thought we'd go over them bit by bit and then dive in to see how we can help folks with them. And so at the high level, we put them into a bucket. People, process and product or technology. So the first key area I think a lot of teams maybe struggle with is team readiness for automation. So I'd like to get both your point of views on what we mean by team readiness for automation. What comes, what plays into that when someone's trying to choose if a team is ready to do automation? Shift left, shift right. Continuous integration, continuous delivery. So, Elisa, let's start with you and get your opinion on team readiness for automation. What does that mean?

Perfect. And I'm going to take this from the perspective of what we've heard clients themselves say. It's really fun and cool when you've finally signed the check and you're ready to adopt automation. And it's like, wow, there's all these wonderful things that automation can offer us. Speed, quality, right? But then sometimes, and again, I've heard this directly from customers, we forget about the people component. So you're not going to get speed, you're not going to get quality, you're not going to get sort of the return you expect from customers if your team isn't ready. And automation is not the same as the types of processes you're using today, which are much more conducive to manual environments. And what we're still hearing, which is probably mind blowing for some of your guests, is that upwards of 80% of testing environments are still manual. And it's understandable, right? Because again, when we think about team readiness, it's not a simple process. Right. And so what we talk to our customers about is making sure that you also assess skill set. Right? You understand the process, the manual approach that you're using today because it has a process behind it. And then you compare that to what the process will look like once you've automated testing. Right. And once you know what that is, there is a delta in skill set. We see now that in a lot of the Fortune 500 companies, they now have an Automation specialist. We actually advocate for a new title in QA called the Quality Assurance Specialist. So going from, you know, what you may have been, you know, kind of a more tactical approach to testing, we believe automation can elevate your role, the role of a quality assurance person into becoming more of a specialist in automation. And so skill set is critical. I talk about skills, I talk about mastery of leading codeless testing. Right. So that, think about that, that's a significant change in how you function or how you manage testing is if you're adopting a code free automation tool and being going from, you know, coding to not coding is a significant shift in how you manage testing. And then the second one we talk about is just you could become an advocate once you've adopted a more automation approach. Now what you have more time to do is become an advocate for quality software. Right. If you've let go of some of those additional steps that in your manual process, now being an automation expert, you can actually start to advocate, speak to the business about ways to ensure quality, ways to ensure that customers get what they want out of all of your applications. But those would be my 2. Right. Skills changing from your role as a sort of tactical leader to a specialist. And then the other one is definitely just familiarity with methods. Right. So a typical manual environment is probably not going to be set up, may or may not be set up for agile. Right. For Agile and DevOps. And those require a whole different sort of an understanding of what agile means. Right. And how you manage testing through an agile approach.

Greatr, I want to get you in here, but one thing Lissy mentioned was you speak to a lot of clients. How many of them actually are still just doing manual, no automation whatsoever? Because I think I talked to a lot of people. It always seems like everyone's doing automation. But that's why I love speaking to vendors, because you speak with all kinds of folks.

Yeah.

Do you know, is there a percentage that you've seen?

Yeah. And so I want to say, but Vidr can keep me honest, that probably all of them are, you know, came to us without a cohesive automation approach to testing. Very few were using test automation but fragmented. And they came to us because they were using little tools for this and that, but weren't necessarily looking at testing end to end.

Right.

And for that it takes picking the right automation platform. Right. You don't want one that can only support web environments. You don't want a test automation platform that can only support desktop. Right. And so in many cases they were working with Automation testing. But it wasn't doing everything they needed to be able to deploy it across the business. Right. Or across, I should say, all of your applications. And the way that I like to put that is end to end testing is critical because you're able to test an entire user flow. Right. Beginning to end. And what's most important for all of us in business, what keeps us afloat, is customer first. Right. And so if you can't test what a customer is doing in your application, with your application end to end, then you're really, you're not looking at the whole, you're not seeing the whole picture of their experience. Great.

Fitr jump in. What are your thoughts on. Sure, yeah.

I think Lisa has hit it on the head, Joe. You know, a lot of organizations are doing automation. Right. Large enterprises are definitely doing it, but it's a fragmented approach. They're doing it in a pocket. Right. But not holistically across. So if we look at most enterprises that we work with or talk to, the initial input is, yeah, we're doing automation. As you go into the details, it's about 20%. Right. The remaining 80% is still manually executed, which is kind of crazy when you think about it. And one of the biggest reasons so much is still manually driven is because of the fact that businesses today are only now starting to move to this whole concept of end to end business process validation. Right. Not tied to one application. But think about it from the bigger picture of what the business and the clients are going to interact with these softwares, and they want essentially the testing to be done across the entire lifecycle, the entire business process. And that is a concept which is becoming more and more pervasive in the marketplace today. And I think that's one of the reasons why enterprises are looking for products that can support not just one particular type of technology, but essentially much more broad test that entire business process and deliver the value at a business process level rather than an application level.

All right? So I guess that brings up more complexity in the sense that Lisa was saying that it's hard to find people with skills that are automation engineers, that are coders, that can be developers, and that's just for a web app. So now you're talking end to end. And now not only are you going to cover that, but we're going to do the whole process. So how does that play into to people readiness for automation if you can't even handle a web browser before you even go to the end to end process?

Right. Lisa, do you mind if I Take that one.

Take it.

Thank you. So I think that's a very relevant question. Right. We have to be realistic on what skills the QA teams today have and what skills they will need in the future. And as they start to move into these agile environments. Right. One of the things that at least me and my team believe is how do we give automation to a larger chunk of the community of testers? Right. Whether they're manual or ready automation testers. And our approach to this is essentially the no code approach because it simplifies the complexity around automation. And in doing so, one of the things that we're very, we're big believers in is start small. Right. Don't just go ahead and take a product and start to use it all over the place and try and achieve success on a massive scale. I think that's certainly possible to do, but it's a lot more of a hurdle upfront. Right. So our method is, hey, take a no code approach. Let's use some folks in your manual team. Let's also use some folks in your engineering team and essentially drive the concept of quality specialists. Right. And let's focus on one or two key business processes and show how you as the quality specialist can deliver end to end business process validation for your organization. And I think once they see that level of success up front, there is a willingness to start to explore how this can be rolled out much more broadly across their enterprises.

And Lisa, I just keep coming back to your original answer. You also brought up something about going from coding to non coding. And I guess maybe because the people I speak with, there was a push going from back in the day when I was doing automations, a tester, manual tester, to an sda. So when that develops, it almost sounds like you're saying we're going back now to no more development now you're going to be like, no code, you don't need to know how to code. And it's all going to be magic and beautiful. How does that work? How do you first convince someone that that's a good approach and two, that it's valid now? Like what's different now than maybe something that may have been thought of 20 years ago that may not have worked when people tried to take that approach?

Yeah, and I'll say in a very small way, I was coding early in my career, right. And it was fun, to be honest. Once you learn a language, right. It's a language. And I was, you know, if I just take myself as, put myself in their shoes, right. I was super impressed and probably blown away once applications started to make developing anything so much easier, right? With the. Just when you look at the user interfaces for a lot of these tools that are no code, right? It really takes you from having to be up and running, taking months, weeks, I should say, to that day, right? And I'm talking about more of a consumer application, right? If you just take a lot of the applications that are available even to just marketers like me, right? Take WordPress as an example, right? WordPress is considered sort of low code, no code, right? Where I don't really have to get into the scripting to make changes to pages. I don't necessarily have to figure out the specific coding to do something magical with animations as an example, right? But to not have to worry about scripting means that I can now pay more attention to functionality, I can now pay more attention to experience, I can now pay more attention to how the application is designed, right? And so I think that really is the main purpose behind no Code is not necessarily to say we're getting rid of a skill set. No, I don't think it's getting rid of a skill set. I think you still have to understand the world of coding. You do. And if I take myself as an example, right. I've got a whole WordPress site that sure sort of preached no code, but I, I still don't get the performance I want, right? And so in many cases, I still have to look at that, the way that that application is built. I have to understand coding, I have to understand malfunctions, I have to understand design, right? And so I, I think that language is important, but it becomes even more, what I should say, powerful or impactful when you marry your proficiency in coding with how applications work with no code, right? And so I think really the world of coding now is just being sort of moved into a hybrid space where your coding skill is essential. It was foundational, right? But now you're going to be able to do so much more with applications that don't require that heavy of sort of coding. Because now you can worry about the front end of the application, right? You can worry, like, as I mentioned, right, you can worry about function, you can worry about design, you can worry about experience. Some of these other things that, again, are important to that thing we mentioned in the beginning, the customer, right? And so the sooner that you can be pleasing the customer and providing a better experience for that customer, I think then you're sort of focused on the. Right. You can focus more of your time on the most important, you know, kind of part of your business. That's my perspective now, from a historical standpoint of we were coding and then we weren't coding, and now we're, you know, sort of, it's back and forth, you know, I guess like everything. Some things come back into fashion. I don't think coding will come back into fashion sort of as being that thing that people have to do. Because. Because think about it, right? We're moving into the new age of artificial intelligence where humans can spend less time doing the manual work, spend more time doing, using those kind of meta skills that are. That we actually can do a better job of creativity, communication. Right. Critical thinking, problem solving, all of that sort of stuff that we should be spending more of our time doing. Right? And that's my perspective.

Absolutely. Peter, do you have anything to add?

Yeah, I'll add on a broader trend. Joe. So, you know, at the end of the day, if you think about how easy technology has become to use, right. Over the last 30 or 40 years, even think about it from a developer standpoint, right? It used to be so much more difficult, time consuming to build out certain software applications. Today we're seeing that trend around even development tools becoming easier and easier to use, right? And I think over time, there's an embrace from the overall engineering community for simpler and simpler technology to use that gives you the same overall output, right? Absolutely. There is a place to do a certain amount of coding. Some folks will still want to code when they test. But I think if you look at it from a larger perspective, software is becoming easier and easier to use. And one of the themes that's enabling that ease of use is a reduction in the amount of intervention, right. In the amount of development effort that goes in to build out applications. And it's important to keep that trend at the center of how we see automation tools progressing. Because, you know, if you don't do that, I think we do a disservice sometimes to our clients, right. And what they really want in the marketplace. Because more and more folks are now using technology at the same time. Not all of the folks who use technology know exactly how to build out technology. And if we can give tools to them that allow them to do more build and test independent of the engineering teams, it's actually allowing more and more people to participate in the technology transformation that most businesses today, if not all business today, are going through.

Absolutely. All right, so there's three game changers in test automation. We've only covered one. So I want to get to the second one. And the second one that we pulled out was the criteria of the right product for the business. You know, design, agile, test management, type issues. So let's start with the second game changer. Once people have the team ready for automation, how do they know what's the right product for the business to start with? Lisa or Vidar, you the one?

Sure. Thanks, Joe. So I think it's very, very important when you're doing an assessment of various products in the market to figure out what is going to work for your team based on their skill sets. Right. We just spoke a little bit earlier about the realities of testing teams today. Right. And their skillset. Start with understanding where the team today is with their technical capabilities and use that as a baseline in order to start to filter out what are the testing products that you want to be leveraging for your organization. Right. Because the truth is you can't go ahead and do an assessment on 15 different tools. You can. It's going to be a big waste of time in my opinion. But it's important to start with where your team is. From there it's very important to also think about what's the total cost of ownership because there are products out in the market which essentially may be free, but you know, if they are free today, think about how much time or effort it may take to bring new members of the team onto that particular software. Right. Or the amount of effort may go into maintaining that particular software. So my other major recommendation in selecting a tool is don't just think about a one time price, but really think of the total ownership cost right across your annual or the term of the entire license period for that product. Lisa, anything you want to add?

Yeah, the big one that I had those on my list. Right. But if, if I literally were talking to somebody in an elevator and they're like, why, you know, what's so important about test automation? The other one that I would add is heterogeneity. If you're going to pick a test automation platform that's limited, it only supports web applications or it only supports, you know, desktop applications or whatever it may be in a application driven world, you're going to be stuck. And that kind of will impact total cost, right? That will impact to some extent it impacts team readiness because you probably are testing multiple applications. You just take any Fortune 500 company or even smaller ones they're using, I'm sure in a magnitude of like over hundreds of applications. Right. And so if you really want to freely manage those against a User experience. You have to have a heterogeneous test automation platform. You have to. Or you'll be back to a fragmented approach. Right. I'll use this automation tool for this, I'll use that one for that. And then you add up the cost and it's like that makes no sense. And so heterogeneous test automation platforms are also a critical linchpin to end to end testing. Right. And the ability for your test, your team to really be able to look at functionality across the entire experience.

Do you find this a big stumbling block? For example, I work for an enterprise and it was a greenfield application. It started off as a web app and a year and a half later they're like, oh, we actually need to integrate with these thick client applications for radiologists. And because using Selenium you can't interact with that, it was impossible. So they didn't look at the roadmap, they knew it was coming, they didn't plan for it, they took the easy way, open source and just started going for it. Is that something common that you see that maybe when someone's planning, don't look just at your current stack, but maybe down the line what you plan on building and make sure what you choose is actually be able to cover that also?

Yeah, we are seeing. It's a really good point you brought up, Joe. We're actually seeing this play out in many primarily enterprise accounts. Right. Where they are now starting to, as they move into agile. Right. And move into this whole concept of product development instead of project delivery. When they think of product, they really think of an entire value stream. And that value stream doesn't just touch one application. Right. It's cutting across multiple applications, really transform that user experience for that business process, so to speak. Right. And that's where we're seeing a lot of our existing clients wanting to move down a more strategic approach on using the product to do the end to end value stream testing. Right. We do see some smaller companies typically today who are still doing this fragmented approach to testing. Typically, you're right. Starting with Selenium for their web applications. Right. But as more and more organizations are going down the product delivery route, I believe there is this change in buyer behavior to really assess products that can deliver on business process testing, end to end testing. Right. Like internally, I'm sure many companies are calling it now heterogeneous as well. We refer to end to end as heterogeneous testing in our landscape. So we are seeing that change coming more and more at an enterprise level. It's a little slower in the mid market segment, so to speak.

Absolutely. And Lisa, we going to say anything around that before we go to the next.

No, I was actually going to turn the question back to you because you write about all the most important components of a test automation platform. Right. And so what would be yours? What would you add to the list?

Oh, it's tough. Yeah. There's so many things I can go with. I just think a lot of times people don't even think about how they're going to scale their automation. So they may start just creating something. Oh, it works. I've seen this a lot. You'll get consultants in, they'll get something working for a few months and then they leave. And when they. Before they left, everything looks fine. And it's almost like a wave. Like, oh, we got some progress. Some tests have been automated, we see the results, they leave and then, oh, they get flaky, they stop failing. No one's paying attention to them. Let's get rid of it. You know, it's just like a big wave. So that's, that's the biggest challenge I've seen a lot of.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, Joe. Absolutely. The handover becomes critical as the SI or the consulting company moves on. Right. And then to your point, it comes in on skill set. Right, right. Is the new team coming in, you know, capable to handle this or not? And it's very important because if you don't do it, your entire investment starts to deteriorate very, very quickly in the space of testing.

Cool. So we went over team readiness as the first key criteria to get a team ready for automation. That's really a game changer once you have it in place. The second one was the criteria for the right product for the business, which we went over. And I think the third point we pulled out was selecting the best testing approach once you have the first two in place, which I think we put under the people, process type of section. So now we get to like the technology, our approach, so. Or process. So what's the best approach to start with, do you think?

At this point, Lisa, you want to go ahead?

So if I. So I think we should clarify for the audience, when we say testing approach, we're really referring to as what are the most important things to think about when you're making a decision about who's the right testing partner for you? We're really talking management. So not testing approach in terms of, is it functional testing, Is it. You know, there's so many different types of testing approaches, but Here we're referring to management of testing. Right. And there's a lot of terms used whether you're doing agile, right. And you're adapting your testing approach to agile environments. But what I would say, and we hear this a lot, it's preached, but it's not necessarily done, is starting to think about testing at the beginning of the software development lifecycle. So not, you know, kind of starting with the end in mind. Similar concept as that where when you're looking at how you're developing the applications, you're also preparing for what will happen in the testing process. Right. And some of that early thinking is sort of test development, test design development, if you will. Right. Where you're testing earlier. And so I think that's something that's critical because as I mentioned, even though it's talked a lot about, we still hear from, you know, from customers that it's an afterthought. And so we, when testing is an afterthought, it just means that the application is likely going to be much more error prone. Right. If there are changes that you discovered as part of the testing process, those quality assurance specialists that could see, gee, this functionality would have been better if it did this or if it did that. Right. You're going to save yourself a lot of time if those conversations were happening sooner. Right. So I would say that's one. The second one that I would say is making sure that your test management approach is conducive to agile and continuous testing. Right. And we had one customer that said my end game, my sort of the thing on my bucket list he said is true continuous testing that could be kind of integrated into my CI pipeline and continuous integration. Right. Continuous development. And you want to think about test automation in the same way. And he hadn't achieved that yet. Right. It was getting close, but in reality he couldn't do sort of, you know, we're testing literally as you've got applications that you're developing and then releasing, you can automate how that is done on a regular basis. Right. And you know, always expect that the testing approach is going to be seamless, right. To the point where you're going to get much better quality over time.

Right.

And so those are the two that I would say is just being able to achieve continuous testing as part of your management approach. And then the other one is definitely think about testing earlier, build it into that approach.

Great. And Vitor thoughts on this?

Yeah, I agree with Lisa. You know, adding to what she's saying, couple of things. One is when organizations go down this path, it's really important to set a plan on what they want to test in what kind of timeline. Right. And that could be, you know, the simple stuff many enterprises do is they typically look at what are their mission critical applications and then they want to start out with, you know, what are the most used flows, business processes that are leveraging those applications and start with building out automation for those flows. Right. And also, you know, one of the things that happens when you do this kind of exercise is it allows you to select the right vendor who will partner with you because you can be very transparent then with the vendor to say, hey, this is the applications or these are the business processes that I'm trying to test with the respective applications that interact for this business process. Right. And if you can find a vendor who is flexible to work with you on this entire testing initiative, it's a game changer. And I'll give you an example. We had one of our clients using our product and they came back and said, look, we're going to go through a major upgrade of one of our technologies, right? One of the off the shelf products that we've acquired. And it looks like we're going to have to redo a lot of the testing work because it's, you know, we're jumping three versions up ahead and the technology has really changed completely. And it was a interesting experience for us because we didn't want to let the client down. We know how much effort they had spent putting into automation. So we said, okay, you know what, we'll work with you. We can tweak our roadmap a little bit and we can essentially come up with a utility that'll ease this entire migration from their old version to this next gen technology so they didn't have to rebuild all of their test automation from scratch. Right. I think having the right vendor to partner with you is definitely the second criteria. The first one, like I just mentioned, is to make sure that you have a good strategy in place as well. Right. Before you go down this approach. The third is it's also important to think about, you know, where are some of the roadblocks today in your testing life cycle? Right. It's not always just about functional testing. We're hearing a lot of clients come back and tell us that, you know, as they scale out automation, test data is a huge problem for them. Right. They don't have the time to go ahead and generate all of this test data. So I think it's important to really think about the whole program holistically prioritize it, think of where the bottlenecks are, and then find the right vendor that's willing to partner with them in order to remove all these bottlenecks and make this journey of stage A, planning to finally stage Z, push into production with minimal defects a reality.

Absolutely. So you brought up finding the right partner. So we went over the three automation game changers, if people had it in place. So I guess what are the advice you give to someone to find the right partner? For example, what is EVO automation? How can AO help, folks? And maybe the things we talked about so far on this interview.

Sure. So, yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, EVO is the right partner. Right. I'm going to have to say that as the CEO of the company, but it's also a very true statement. What we believe is we don't want to just sell a client a test automation solution. Right. We want to partner with our client to get them to their test automation outcome. And there are, I think, countless clients that have, you know, over. We've only been in business for a relatively short amount of time compared to some of the legacy players in this market. But I think it's a testament to the fact that clients really like working with us because we're open to signing up on an outcome. Right. And whether that's them using our product, whether that's them engaging with us, our professional services team, or our partners. But we as EVO are open to having the client work directly with us to drive an outcome. And I think that is one of the big things that differentiates us in the market, because at the end of the day, there are many test automation products in the market. Right. A lot of them are very good today. No doubt about that. But getting that synergy between the vendor provider, the system integrator, and the partner and that client is still a big missing gap in the industry today. And I think we're one of the few, if not the only, that's really willing to sign up with our clients and say, hey, we, we will get the outcome done for you, and we will, you know, sign up contractually to agree for that outcome as well.

How does it help with test data management? Because that's one of the biggest pain points I find with automation that a lot of people struggle with, especially as they're scaling test data management. A lot of companies don't even touch that. So are you saying you can help them with that as well?

So it's a good point, Joe. So today we partner with some of the leading test data management product vendors in the marketplace. But at the same time, we're also right now working on building out our test data management capability. Right. Or essentially the ability to generate synthetic test data. So don't want to talk about that too much more. We had a conversation actually a few weeks ago about getting this thing done quickly. But it is something that we realize there's a market need for and we're addressing very quickly.

Awesome. And Liza, last word on this topic then, I guess how does evo help with these three areas, especially for people? Like, oh, it's just marketing ploy. Like, how do you let people know, hey, give it a try for yourself, see it for yourself and see if it works. And also, I guess, what's the right company? We talked about, like, a lot of times, certain solutions work better with other companies. Sometimes a solution's better for an enterprise than a maybe a smaller company. I don't know what you see evo as the being the perfect fit for someone's listening, going, sounds good, but am I the right, the right customer or will I benefit from this?

Yeah. And so the answer to who is any size company? We have a comprehensive platform enough that it serves the Fortune 500, but if you're a small business and you want automation, it will absolutely cover you. What I would say is our big differentiator beyond the technology itself. Naturally, I would say that we've got all the differentiators in the market. Gartner believes that. So do our own customers. If you look at us on G2, you can read, you know, read it for yourself for in their words. But I would say another big differentiator beyond our technology is the people. Our people walk you through the process. You know, sort of tied at the hip with our customers because there are so many changing aspects of automation as we just talked about it. Right? Team readiness, adapting your process and then putting the technology to work. It's not as simple as vendors make it seem. And really that is when you need the partner that's going to support you from point A to point Z. You need the partner that's going to be in the data center within the IT environment with you that's going to get on the phone with you that's going to say, I will fix it with you, that's going to say, I'll help train your team so that you can achieve team readiness. Right. You need the partner that's going to be there with you from beginning to end. And I believe that's a differentiating factor. For avo. Cool.

Okay, Lisa and Vitor, before we go, is there one piece of actual advice you can give to someone to help them with their automation efforts? And what's the best way to find or contact you? We'll start with you. Lisa and Vidr will land with you.

Yeah. So number one, starting point put together, start that test plan, right? That plan for automation. What is my test automation plan? And literally it is identifying where you are and where you want to be. And as those, as you start writing down number one, number two, number three, those pieces will start to come together just as we described, right? So what are the things you need to think about with respect to people? What are the things you need to think about with respect to your current process? And then let's pick the right technology. And we just went over that criteria. That would probably be the simplest structure, you know, just to start your test strategy or test automation strategy. Easiest way to get a hold of us, avoautomation AI and all of your listeners will find a lot of cool stuff there. We write about everything we just talked about, right? So how to write a test automation strategy for your business. We have a blog on that, how to pick the right criteria for the best platform. We've written about that. So a lot of good stuff that I think your listeners will find. And it's really easy to get a hold of us, whether it be through our live chat or it be through just the really simple request, a demo button or of course, you know, I'm sure we're going to give them an easy way to get ahold of us after this podcast.

Awesome and Vitor piece of actionable advice.

Yeah, thanks, Joe. So I think one simple takeaway, and I mentioned a little bit earlier, certain goals start small, right? We'll tell our clients, hey, you can do insprint automation, right, with our product. It's a true statement. But would I tell them to start doing in Sprint Automation, you know, as the first thing they do? Probably not. There's a few other things they'll need to tweak internally with their own processes. Right. To get that going. So my simple advice is, you know, start small, show success, and then scale up from there.

Thanks again for your automation awesomeness. The links to everything of value we covered in this episode, head on over to testguild.com.

And while you're there, make sure to click on the Try for free today link under the exclusive sponsor section to learn all about Sauce Lab's awesome products and services. 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.

Thanks for listening to the Test Guild Automation Podcast. Head on over to testguild.com for full show notes, amazing blog articles, and online testing conferences. Don't forget to subscribe to the Guild to continue your testing journey.