Over the past two years I’ve interviewed many awesome developers and testers for my TestTalks podcast. I've also interviewed many automation engineers who will be speaking at the Automation Guild online conference in January to create this list of automation leaders and experts you should follow on Twitter in 2017.
The test automation leaders
Jonathon Wright
@Jonathon_Wright
Jonathon is an automation cyborg from the future: At the HPE Discover conference in London last year, he gave me a tour of the city while talking automation for 8 hours non-stop. Jonathon is a top strategic thought leader in emerging technologies, innovation and automation. He has authored several books on test automation, as well running numerous online webinars and training courses.
[tweet]812956301080883200[/tweet]
Dan Cuellar
@thedancuellar
Dan is the creator of the open-source mobile automation framework Appium, head of software testing for @FoodItFOOD, and a penguin enthusiast. 'Nuff said.
[tweet]797127343638806529[/tweet]
Dave Haeffner
@TourDeDave
@SeleniumHQ project member Dave Haeffner is the writer of Elemental Selenium, a free, weekly Selenium tips newsletter read by hundreds of testing professionals. He’s also the creator and maintainer of ChemistryKit, an open source Selenium framework, and is the author of the Selenium Guidebook.
[tweet]806543989537210368[/tweet]
Eran Kinsbruner
@ek121268
A director and mobile tech evangelist at Perfecto, Eran Kinsbruner has a wealth of hands-on, mobile testing experience under his belt, both from a functional testing and non-functional perspective.
[tweet]812119817633275904[/tweet]
Alan Richardson
@eviltester
Alan, an independent testing consultant and trainer, is well known for his expertise in agile and automated testing, as well as manual exploratory, technical and performance testing. He is the author of Java for Testers, Dear Evil Tester, and Selenium Simplified; and is the creator of many of online training courses.
[tweet]816260127166779393[/tweet]
Nikolay Advolodkin
@Nikolay_A00
Nikolay is a prolific automation test and quality assurance engineer who is currently a software testing instructor on his blog, UltimateQA.com. He’s also the creator and co-owner of QTPtutorial.net and a frequent contributor to the blog SimpleProgrammer.com.
[tweet]815988810710482944[/tweet]
Bas Dijkstra
@_basdijkstra
Bas helps organizations improve their testing efforts through the smart application of tools. He publishes a weekly blog on topics related to test automation and service virtualization at ontestautomation.com.
[tweet]816265748695973888[/tweet]
John Ferguson Smart
@wakaleo
An international speaker, consultant, author and trainer, John Ferguson is the author of the best-selling BDD in Action, as well as Jenkins: The Definitive Guide and Java Power Tools. He also leads development on the innovative Serenity BDD test automation library, which has been described as the "best open source Selenium WebDriver framework."
[tweet]812400347213942785[/tweet]
Scott Nimrod
@bizmonger
Fascinated with software craftsmanship, Scott Nimrod has been practicing software development since 2003. He’s a thriving entrepreneur, software consultant and blogger who focuses on native application development and test automation. He regularly contributes to his Bizmonger blog.
[tweet]811549546790748160[/tweet]
Greg Paskal
@GregPaskal
Greg is director of quality assurance for automation at Ramsey Solutions. He is the author of multiple white papers on test automation and testing, and recently published his first book, Test Automation in the Real World, which contains insights from his 30+ years of automated testing development.
[tweet]811251660324487168[/tweet]
Matt Wynne
@mattwynne
Not only is he the founder of Cucumber Ltd. and core developer on the Cucumber project, Matt Wynne is the author of one of my favorite books on BDD, The Cucumber Book: Behavior-Driven Development for Testers and Developers.
[tweet]809048786559438852[/tweet]
Seb Rose
@sebrose
After writing the internal training courses for IBM’s Quality Software Engineering department (QSE), Seb Rose went on to develop his own courses, which he runs for clients throughout Europe. He speaks regularly at international conferences on topics such as unit testing, test-driven development, behavior-driven development, and acceptance test-driven development. Seb was a contributing author to O’Reilly’s 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know, is a popular blogger, and is a regular contributor to technical journals.
[tweet]813098809278533632[/tweet]
Wilson Mar
@wilsonmar
Wilson has been building and bringing enterprise applications to market on major platforms—from mobile to server clouds—as an architect, developer, performance tester, and manager. His website, wilsonmar.com, provides concise, in-depth advice on leading technologies, especially on LoadRunner and performance engineering.
[tweet]813810784425877504[/tweet]
Paul Merrill
@dpaulmerrill
Paul is the founder of and principal software engineer in test at Beaufort Fairmont Automated Testing Services. He co-hosts “Reflection as a Service,” a podcast about software development, automated testing and entrepreneurialism.
[tweet]811239885134819328[/tweet]
Angie Jones
@techgirl1908
As a consulting automation engineer at LexisNexis who advises several scrum teams on QA automation strategies and best practices, Angie Jones has developed automation frameworks for countless software products. A master inventor, she is known for her innovative and out-of-the-box thinking style, which has resulted in more than 20 patented inventions in the US and China.
[tweet]816328291892293635[/tweet]
Katrina Clokie
@katrina_tester
Katrina serves a team of more than 30 testers as a testing coach in Wellington, New Zealand. She is an active contributor to the international testing community as the editor of Testing Trapeze magazine, and as a mentor with Speak Easy. She is also co-founder of her local testing Meetup, WeTest Workshops, and is an international conference speaker, as well as a regular blogger and tweeter.
[tweet]816001893012946944[/tweet]
Richard Bradshaw
@FriendlyTester
Richard is a "friendly tester" with a passion for all things testing. As a speaker and trainer, he’s a big advocate of automation—no, not the silver bullet type, but the type that really supports testing and testers. He is FriendlyBoss at @ministryoftest and the creator of @WhiteboardTest.
[tweet]814381112382193664[/tweet]
Mark Fink
@markfink
In addition to running the independent software testing consultancy, FinkLabs, Mark Fink is also the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Test Automation, and the creator of many test automation and performance tools. This includes GoGrinder, which can help you and your team check the stability and performance of your code.
[tweet]802466690550239232[/tweet]
Paul Grizzaffi
@pgrizzaffi
Paul is an automation program architect who has created automation platforms and tool frameworks based on proprietary, open source and vendor-supplied tool chains in diverse product environments ranging from telecom to stock trading, e-commerce, and healthcare. He is an accomplished speaker at both local and national meetings and conferences, and serves as an advisor to software test professionals and STPCon.
[tweet]814136386462908420[/tweet]
Mark Collin
@Ardesco
Mark is a big believer in open source technology, and spends much of his time contributing to open source projects. He is the creator and maintainer of the driver-binary-downloader-Maven-plugin, which allows Maven to download ChromeDriver, OperaDriver, IE driver, and PhantomJS to machines as a part of a standard Maven build. Mark has also contributed code to the core Selenium codebase.
[tweet]798892293931421696[/tweet]
Paul Grossman
@qtpmgrossman
A well-known test automation engineer with over 15 years’ experience, Paul Grossman has designed numerous WinRunner and QTP/UFT automation frameworks. He has spoken at HP Discover, QAAM, PSQT and the Dallas User’s Group; and is one of the top contributors to Facebook’s largest automation group, Advance Test Automation.
[tweet]812650254432694272[/tweet]
Gojko Adzic
@gojkoadzic
Gojko is the author of Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve your Tests, Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve your User Stories, Impact Mapping, Specification by Example, Bridging the Communication Gap, and Test Driven .NET Development with FitNesse.
[tweet]815592444008005632[/tweet]
Alan Page
@alanpage
Alan first joined Microsoft as a member of the Windows 95 team, and has since worked on many Windows releases, early versions of Internet Explorer, Office Lync, and Xbox One. He’s also a frequent speaker at industry testing and software engineering conferences. Alan writes about testing on his Angry Weasel blog, was the lead author of How We Test Software at Microsoft, and contributed chapters to Beautiful Testing and Experiences of Test Automation. He is also one of the hosts of the AB Testing podcast.
[tweet]691081004644208641[/tweet]
Jim Evans
@jimevansmusic
He has spent more than two decades in the software industry, concentrating in software testing but software QA developer Jim Evans only began working with WebDriver and Selenium in late 2009. His journey began with the .NET bindings, and he rewrote the Internet Explorer driver in late 2010.
[tweet]811698473540186112[/tweet]
Simon Stewart
@shs96c
He invented WebDriver while working at ThoughtWorks and has been a software engineer at Facebook. But what makes Simon Stewart a test engineer to follow was his work at Google, where he led the Selenium project, building the infrastructure required to run millions of daily browser-based tests.
[tweet]798567400367005696[/tweet]
Daniel Knott
@dnlkntt
Daniel has worked on a number of projects, developing fully automated testing frameworks for Android, iOS and web applications. He is a well-known mobile expert and a speaker at conferences in Europe and posts regularly to his Adventures in QA blog.
[tweet]/814090294652239872[/tweet]
Mark Tomlinson
@markontask
Mark "the performance Sherpa" Tomlinson has worked for many firms as a testing practitioner and consultant, and now offers coaching, training and consulting to help customers adopt modern performance testing and engineering strategies, practices and behaviors for better-performing technology systems. He is the co-founder and host of the popular PerfBytes podcast.
[tweet]812376927784665088[/tweet]
Rosie Sherry
@rosiesherry
Rosie is the founder of the Software Testing Club and Ministry of Testing communities, and co-founder of the testing agency Testing Ninjas. She’s also the organizer of the Ministry of Testing's popular TestBash software testing conferences.
[tweet]816016144536584192[/tweet]
Sahaswaranamam Subra
@Sahaswaranamam
Sahaswaranamam is a developer and general technologist with a passion for producing high-quality working, usable software. He has more than 10 years of experience in DevOps, quality engineering, consulting, and leading and coaching agile teams.
[tweet]812681145917775872[/tweet]
Anton Angelov
@angelovstanton
Anton, a quality assurance architect at Telerik, is passionate about automation and designing testing best practices. He is an active blogger, founder of Automate the Planet, and one of the best rated answer authors of questions about Test Automation Frameworks (WebDriver) on Stack Overflow. His interests include Selenium, Jenkins, and CSharp.
[tweet]815966976036184065[/tweet]
Roy de Kleijn
@TheWebTester
Roy "The Web Tester" Kleijn is an independent technical test consultant with many years of experience in automated testing, with a focus on web technologies and new programming languages. He regularly speaks at conferences and provides practice-oriented Selenium training.
[tweet]/803625697528909825[/tweet]
Unmesh Gundecha
@upgundecha
In his 10 years working in software development and testing, Unmesh Gundecha has architected functional test automation projects using industry standard, in-house and custom test automation frameworks, along with leading commercial and open source test automation tools. He regularly posts to his TestO'Matic blog.
[tweet]816352902469984258[/tweet]
Jason Huggins
@hugs
Yes, being a robot artist tops his Twitter profile, but Jason Huggins is also the creator of Selenium, co-founder of Sauce Labs, inventor of the Tapsterbot, and a member of the HealthCare.gov Tech Surge.
[tweet]812073701743226880[/tweet]
Image source: Flickr
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