Slack is the hottest collaboration tool 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.

In the past year of my work at Applitools I curated a collection of practical public Slack channels which are a must for every tester.

Selenium

SeleniumHQ's Slack is a great community with about 5,000 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.

Testing Community

The Testers.io community has over 8,000 members and has a wide range of discussion channels which are super useful. Topics include Automation, Mobile Testing, Exploratory Testing, Events, Jobs, API Testing and more. When you join, make sure you say hello at both the Welcome and Introductions channels to tell everyone about yourself.

Join the Testing Community here.

Robot Framework

The Robot Slack community has about 5,000 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 Robot Framework community here.

Ministry of Testing

Ministry of Testing is great community which contains over 5,000 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, Continous 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.

TechWell Hub

Techwell's Slack is the best source to learn what's going on in our community. They just announced they passed the 3000 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 TechWell Hub 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 1,500 members and is fast-growing.Some of the popular channels include Java Programming, Performance Testing, Scale with Docker, and more.

Join Test Automation University community here.