Since March, many fellow developers and software testers have been working from home, making online communities that much more important to keep in touch with trends and best practices.
Slack is one of the most popular collaboration tools in the market today, both as an internal tool for teams working together and for external groups who share similar interest and need a place to collaborate and share ideas.
Slack also offers a free tier which is used by many public communities such as software developers and testers. This tier includes unlimited private and public channels, 10K messages, up to 10 apps (Github, Bitbucket, etc.), file sharing, custom notifications and more.
Over a year ago, as part of my work at Applitools, I curated a collection of practical public Slack channels which are a must for every tester. Thinking back on this past year – I thought it would be a great time to update this.
Ministry of Testing
Ministry of Testing is great community which contains over 10,500 software testing specialists who are ready to help with any software testing related question you may have. Some of the popular channels include Automation, Exploratory Testing, Mobile Testing, Continuous Integration, API Testing and more. The Job channel is also very active so make sure to check this one out. Also, don’t miss out the Blog channel which aggregates some of the industry best blogs you want to follow.
Join the Ministry of Testing community here.
Test Automation University
The Test Automation University Slack group is the only free online software testing courses library. Speakers include Angie Jones, Dave Haeffner, Jason Arbon, Amber Race and more. This community has over 8,300 members and is fast-growing.Some of the popular channels include Java Programming, Performance Testing, Scale with Docker, and more.
Join the Test Automation University community here.
Sign up for Test Automation University.
Robot Framework
The Robot Slack community has about 8,200 Robot framework fans. If you don’t know the Robot Framework, it is a generic test automation framework for acceptance testing and acceptance test-driven development. There is an amazing newbie channel for anyone who is just starting to use the framework. The Python, Appium, and RIDE channels are also quite popular and contain valuable information shared by fellow friendly testers.
Join the Robot Framework community.
Selenium
SeleniumHQ’s Slack is a great community with about 8,000 members. Most popular topics include Selenium, Selenium IDE, Jenkins, Appium, WebDriverIO, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Python and more. Members are super friendly and helpful, ready to answer questions and tackle challenges we all face on a daily basis. Plus it has a job posting channel for those who are in the market or those who are hiring.
Join the Selenium community here.
TechWell Hub
Techwell’s Slack is the best source to learn what’s going on in our community. They just announced they passed the 5700 members count so you should be in good company. Popular channels include Agile, DevOps, Security, Strategy, AI, Women who Test, Leadership and more. Plus since they host Star East/West/Canada and Agile Testing Days, it makes this channel a great place to chat with fellow conference attendees.
Join the TechWell Hub community here.
Cypress Gitter Community
Slack is not the only game in town, and we’d be hard pressed not to give a shout out to our friends over at Cypress.io. Their community on Gitter has 9100 members and is a must for those working with or considering Cypress.io for test automation.
Join the Cypress Gitter community.
This is an updated version of a 2019 post previously published by DZone.
