Re: [Wtr-general] Do you want Watir to be more popular?
Sorry about that Paul. :) I'll give the secret away now just in case I
end up prematurely emailing again:
Kevin Spacey *is* Keyser Soze!
I'll keep it terse and summarize as opposed to rambling as I was
intending with my previous email/manifesto.
As Watir becomes more popular and used by more people, we need help
to keep it going. It is open source, it's something Bret, Paul, and
others have devoted their time freely to work on and make available.
The more popular Watir becomes, the more infrastructure and help is
needed. If you have some time, donate it. As I said before, if you've
been using Watir for only a day, then you're one day ahead of the next
person.
Once I made the decision to use Watir for functional automation, I
resolved to become a part of the project and dedicate some time to
helping improve Watir. Along the way, I've managed to make an ass of
myself on several occasions - sending out a half finished email :),
answering a couple of questions erroneously trying to multitask. That
being said, I've made some positive contributions as well I'd hope.
Overall, I'd agree, that Watir should be more popular and I hesitate
to use yet another pun but jump in the Watir. Watir is a great libary
to use and introduce people to Ruby as several of you have mentioned.
If you'd like to make Watir more popular then please contribute in
whatever way you can - the Wiki can be added to by anyone, there are
more and more simple questions coming up on the mailing list that many
people can answer, any documentation about your own experiences and
learnings are helpful.
Otherwise, there's only so much time and effort that can be spent by
a few individuals on an unpaid project, so that if it becomes too
popular without a decent infrastructure may fail under the weight and
drive people away.
As I said before, 'Carried on by the people at large', or
essentially supported in a concrete way by the people at large is an
important idea in the widespread adoption of Watir. Get involved!
-Charley
On 9/18/06, Walter Kruse <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I too started learning Ruby because I wanted to use Watir. Little did I
> know what I was letting myself in for. Now, I do almost everything in
> Ruby. All I still use Perl for nowadays is Win32-GUITest stuff. If it
> wasn't for Watir, I would probably never have looked at Ruby.
>
> Having said that, Watir itself is awesome. And it's a good experience to
> see how the open source development methodology works, as done by Good
> Guys (TM). Yes, I want Watir to be more popular.
>
>
>
> -Original Message-
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Bret Pettichord
> Sent: 15 September 2006 11:07 AM
> To: wtr-general@rubyforge.org
> Subject: [Wtr-general] Do you want Watir to be more popular?
>
> A couple of recent posts were premised on the assumption that we want
> Watir to be more popular? Do we? Why?
>
> It got me started on a long post describing my own goals, which needs
> more time. In the mean time, i thought i would ask the question to the
> group.
>
> Bret
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Re: [Wtr-general] Do you want Watir to be more popular?
I too started learning Ruby because I wanted to use Watir. Little did I
know what I was letting myself in for. Now, I do almost everything in
Ruby. All I still use Perl for nowadays is Win32-GUITest stuff. If it
wasn't for Watir, I would probably never have looked at Ruby.
Having said that, Watir itself is awesome. And it's a good experience to
see how the open source development methodology works, as done by Good
Guys (TM). Yes, I want Watir to be more popular.
-Original Message-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Bret Pettichord
Sent: 15 September 2006 11:07 AM
To: wtr-general@rubyforge.org
Subject: [Wtr-general] Do you want Watir to be more popular?
A couple of recent posts were premised on the assumption that we want
Watir to be more popular? Do we? Why?
It got me started on a long post describing my own goals, which needs
more time. In the mean time, i thought i would ask the question to the
group.
Bret
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Important Notice:
Authorised Financial Services Provider
Important restrictions, qualifications and disclaimers
("the Disclaimer") apply to this email. To read this click on the
following address or copy into your Internet browser:
http://www.absa.co.za/disclaimer
The Disclaimer forms part of the content of this email in terms of
section 11 of the Electronic Communications and Transactions
Act, 25 of 2002.
If you are unable to access the Disclaimer, send a blank e-mail
to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and we will send you a copy of the
Disclaimer.
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Re: [Wtr-general] Do you want Watir to be more popular?
While I'm new to the list, and to Watir, I can only say that I think popularity is unavoidable, unfortunately. When you build such a great product, and have such a great team working on it, you have no choice in the matter - it will naturally catch on. Personally, I believe you guys are doing a great job, on product, documentation and support. Could it be better? Of course, it always can, but I've been more then impressed in the past two weeks. Typically, from what I've seen, it's rare to find a good, open source product that has such a mature infrastructure. This is really what makes Watir stand out for me. I would love to see the documentation improve (the RDocs included are sometimes helpful, but many times vague). And, overall, it would be great to find a way to make it even easier - I've been pushing my QA team at work to look towards Watir for testing and automation, and, unfortunately, Watir is a bit too technical for them. Not to say they couldn't do it, but it's a much steeper curve for them, unfortunately. I certainly am glad to have started to use Watir, and look forward to contributing back to it later. Thanks, -Jason Jason L. Alexander > Chief Technology Officer > Telligent Systems, Inc. > http://telligent.com > w: 214.420.1333 > http://JasonA.net -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Bret Pettichord Sent: Sunday, September 17, 2006 2:25 AM To: wtr-general@rubyforge.org Subject: Re: [Wtr-general] Do you want Watir to be more popular? I thank Jim, Richard, Paul and Charley for their posts on this topic. The issue of popularity was first raised in the context of an observation that from the look of our project page at Rubyforge, the project looked dead. I've just made several changes to this page that i think will help curious parties realize that Watir is an active project and the current software and information are at OpenQA. http://rubyforge.org/projects/wtr/ I would appreciate detailed suggestions if you believe that more should be done at this location. I am also collecting suggestions for improvement of the main website (http://wtr.rubyforge.org). Please add your suggestions here: http://jira.openqa.org/browse/WTR-97 Do we want Watir to be more popular is a real question and an important question. Watir is a volunteer project. There are no companies funding it. I spend my own time on it as do all the other volunteers. Why are we doing this? As a volunteer organization, it is important to be clear on the goals of the volunteers and the organization, if you can call it that. I have, at different times, both wanted to make Watir more popular and regret the popularity that it has had. Right now i'm leaning more on the regret side and Charley has heard me kvetch lately about that and his post reflects some of our conversations. There are a number of substansive things to be done, and i'll deal with them in more detail in later posts, but first i want to stay right on this issue of popularity. The question, to me, isn't a matter of popular vs. elitist, but rather of whether Watir needs more popularity right now. And if so, whether i should be spending my project time on this, or encouraging other contributors to do so. To me, to make Watir more popular, you mostly make it easier for people to learn about and use and then also get the word out with articles and talks and blog posts. In the releases leading up to Watir 1.4, Jonathan Kohl really took the lead in popularizing Watir. He created the website at wtr.rubyforge.org, commissioned a logo, wrote the users guide, and worked with Paul Rogers on the API documentation (rdoc) and the Watir Works article for Better Software. But Jonathan and Paul aren't really involved in Watir 1.5, and no one has really taken over the responsibilities that Jonathan shouldered. Charley Baker has been helping lately with some of the kinds of things that Jonathan did. He's been helping me managing the bug list and has been fixing bugs. One big job that we didn't have back with 1.4 is answering the questions on this list. The popularity of Watir has really caused the traffic on the list to blossom/explode. I'd like to make a special thanks to Zeljko (that's pronounced zhel-ko, in case you didn't know) for the help has given on the list. As i feared, opening up the gateway to the OpenQA web forum has really increased the traffic here. I say "fear" because i have a very hard time seeing people struggle with Watir. Personally, i would much rather have Watir be less popular, but have the people who are using it be more successful. And mostly i feel like the way i can do this best is not to improve the documentation for Watir, but just make Watir easier to use and less buggy. Watir is not my first experience with popularity. For a while i had the website that Google ranked
Re: [Wtr-general] Do you want Watir to be more popular?
I thank Jim, Richard, Paul and Charley for their posts on this topic. The issue of popularity was first raised in the context of an observation that from the look of our project page at Rubyforge, the project looked dead. I've just made several changes to this page that i think will help curious parties realize that Watir is an active project and the current software and information are at OpenQA. http://rubyforge.org/projects/wtr/ I would appreciate detailed suggestions if you believe that more should be done at this location. I am also collecting suggestions for improvement of the main website (http://wtr.rubyforge.org). Please add your suggestions here: http://jira.openqa.org/browse/WTR-97 Do we want Watir to be more popular is a real question and an important question. Watir is a volunteer project. There are no companies funding it. I spend my own time on it as do all the other volunteers. Why are we doing this? As a volunteer organization, it is important to be clear on the goals of the volunteers and the organization, if you can call it that. I have, at different times, both wanted to make Watir more popular and regret the popularity that it has had. Right now i'm leaning more on the regret side and Charley has heard me kvetch lately about that and his post reflects some of our conversations. There are a number of substansive things to be done, and i'll deal with them in more detail in later posts, but first i want to stay right on this issue of popularity. The question, to me, isn't a matter of popular vs. elitist, but rather of whether Watir needs more popularity right now. And if so, whether i should be spending my project time on this, or encouraging other contributors to do so. To me, to make Watir more popular, you mostly make it easier for people to learn about and use and then also get the word out with articles and talks and blog posts. In the releases leading up to Watir 1.4, Jonathan Kohl really took the lead in popularizing Watir. He created the website at wtr.rubyforge.org, commissioned a logo, wrote the users guide, and worked with Paul Rogers on the API documentation (rdoc) and the Watir Works article for Better Software. But Jonathan and Paul aren't really involved in Watir 1.5, and no one has really taken over the responsibilities that Jonathan shouldered. Charley Baker has been helping lately with some of the kinds of things that Jonathan did. He's been helping me managing the bug list and has been fixing bugs. One big job that we didn't have back with 1.4 is answering the questions on this list. The popularity of Watir has really caused the traffic on the list to blossom/explode. I'd like to make a special thanks to Zeljko (that's pronounced zhel-ko, in case you didn't know) for the help has given on the list. As i feared, opening up the gateway to the OpenQA web forum has really increased the traffic here. I say "fear" because i have a very hard time seeing people struggle with Watir. Personally, i would much rather have Watir be less popular, but have the people who are using it be more successful. And mostly i feel like the way i can do this best is not to improve the documentation for Watir, but just make Watir easier to use and less buggy. Watir is not my first experience with popularity. For a while i had the website that Google ranked number one for "software testing." That was interesting, but with time, it became more and more of a chore and generated boring emails. So i stopped updating it and today it is ranked only number five, which still isn't bad for a website that is five years out of date. I also co-authored a popular book. That's been a better experience, particularly since i actually get money because of its popularity. So far Watir hasn't generated any direct income for me, other than a paypal donation that i got out of the blue last week (thank you, CR). What i get, in the end, is interesting conversation, or not. And, of course, a decent tool to use in my day-to-day work. Bret ___ Wtr-general mailing list Wtr-general@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/wtr-general
Re: [Wtr-general] Do you want Watir to be more popular?
I certainly don't think the reference here is to the converse of making Watir an elitist, high cultured, artsy testing tool. :) I'll refer to popular in this context as widely used. Please read through my entire post before commenting, revealing secret at the end. To rephrase the question, I'll posit the following: Do we want Watir to gain more popularity thus becoming more widely used? Enough semantics, on to the meat. As Watir becomes more highly used and the user community grows there are some challenges that need to be addressed which aren't as prevelant with a smaller user base, ranked in no order of importance. - Api changes become harder to make as the need increases for backwards compatibility for a larger user base with existing test beds based on a given version's api. The decision then becomes the choice to augment the existing api with additional methods while still supporting the previous api. Support for the existing codebase and the ability to add functionality then starts to become more complex and require more effort. - A wider user base means more diverse and diverging requirements and requests. This is pretty apparent if you look at the number of projects splitting out from the core of Watir: watij, watin, firewatir, watir on rails, safariwatir, watir and rspec, etc. and some of the mailing list requests to get Watir working on linux, other browsers, users using Watir for screen scraping and other purposes. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it does need some attention. If Watir is to be used by a wider user base, some consideration needs to be made in order to: a) Ensure that the original intent and purpose behind the core of Watir is maintained. The reason why it's successful as a testing tool now and has become a model for other projects is that it's easy to learn and use, it's not the swiss army knife of tools, it's straightforward and serves a simple purpose that can be built upon, WET is a good example of that. The user contrib directory for the Watir 1.5.1 release is a great start to having functionality added outside of the core Watir libraries. Watir can be extended without watering down the core (ha ha) as well as allowing some untested or unfinished features. This allows a sort of plugin area which hopefully will be supported by the authors of the extensions on the wiki. Extensions may be incorporated into the core of Watir if unit tests are added, they make sense for Watir's overall goal of web testing and there's a real need for them. b) More users means more mailing list traffic. An obvious side effect, but one that needs to be handled as well and pretty easy to solve. There are several posters who jump in and take the time to answer questions, however, as the traffic grows, we'll need more people to pick up questions and answer them. Watir is an open source project which means it is popular already :) referring to one definition: Of, representing, or carried on by the people at large. 'Carried on by the people at large' is the major point there. I've made an effort and less successfully tried to convince other people to make the effort to give back and spare some time to give back to the open source projects we use. If you've been using Watir for a day then you're ahead of the next guy who can't figure out how to install it or has installed it and doesn't know where to begin. As the user list grows we're getting more of these sorts of resources, and it'd be a great help if people started to view this as a project they're involved in, as opposed to a project they use. You have skills in web design, then add to the On 9/15/06, Paul Carvalho <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 15/09/06, Bret Pettichord <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > A couple of recent posts were premised on the assumption that we want > > Watir to be more popular? Do we? Why? > > > > > > I say 'yes', we do want it to be more popular. Here's my reason why. > > I first started out in this industry as a programmer for several years, > almost 18 years ago. I then moved into Support for a while (swing that > pendulum!) and finally into QA/Test in the early 90's. My programming > skills definitely fell behind as newer, cooler, more powerful programming > languages and methodologies began to appear on the scene. I was always > intimidated by Object-Oriented programming, and I must have tried a dozen > times to pick up Java, JavaScript, Perl, and Python over the last decade. I > came close to Python, but it never really 'stuck' with me. > > Over the last few years I've heard Brian Marick go on and on about Ruby and > how it is the best scripting language for testers. I thought about giving > it a try but it wasn't until Watir was recommended to me on a testing forum > that I finally gave Ruby a look. The problem I needed to solve at the time > was that I needed some simple performance measurements for a web site that I > was testing -- I needed benchmark numbers to
Re: [Wtr-general] Do you want Watir to be more popular?
On 15/09/06, Bret Pettichord <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: A couple of recent posts were premised on the assumption that we wantWatir to be more popular? Do we? Why?I say 'yes', we do want it to be more popular. Here's my reason why.I first started out in this industry as a programmer for several years, almost 18 years ago. I then moved into Support for a while (swing that pendulum!) and finally into QA/Test in the early 90's. My programming skills definitely fell behind as newer, cooler, more powerful programming languages and methodologies began to appear on the scene. I was always intimidated by Object-Oriented programming, and I must have tried a dozen times to pick up Java, _javascript_, Perl, and Python over the last decade. I came close to Python, but it never really 'stuck' with me. Over the last few years I've heard Brian Marick go on and on about Ruby and how it is the best scripting language for testers. I thought about giving it a try but it wasn't until Watir was recommended to me on a testing forum that I finally gave Ruby a look. The problem I needed to solve at the time was that I needed some simple performance measurements for a web site that I was testing -- I needed benchmark numbers to compare against the performance of development builds. I was a little hesitant about trying another scripting language, but I must say that Watir made my life a whole lot easier. I had tried OpenSTA last year and failed to get it completely working with our .Net apps. Watir was different. It didn't care about Viewstates and Gets and Posts - it talked directly to the browser! And the scripts themselves are so readable that you'd swear you're reading pseudo code! I must say that thanks to the hard efforts of everyone who contributed to making Watir possible, I now find myself programming in a powerful, object-oriented scripting language in order to complement my manual testing methods. With the advice from many wonderful people on this mailing list, my interest in the scripting has gone beyond Watir to explore more of what Ruby has to offer. I've been bitten by the programming bug again and it's entirely due to the fact that Watir has made scripting fun and easy for me. My scripts may seem a bit loopy to a seasoned programmer, but I'm happy with them and so is my boss, the VP of R&D at the company I'm currently working at. In fact, some of the scripts we've developed might even get adapted to be used by our Professional Services team too. Because of Watir, our testing bandwidth has increased. For example, investing some time in some simple scripts now allows us to quickly populate large forms (e.g. with ~ 100+ input fields) with random data so that we can proceed more quickly with our manual testing. Watir made it possible for me to get where I am, not Ruby on it's own. You've got a great thing going here. You need to continue to spread the word and show more testers out there how simple it is to get up and running with their own scripts to become more productive, effective, and valuable to their companies. Thank you, Bret and Paul and all the others. Your hard work is making an impact in the Testing community and beyond. Keep up the great work and continue to spread the word!Cheers.Paul Carvalho ___ Wtr-general mailing list Wtr-general@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/wtr-general
Re: [Wtr-general] Do you want Watir to be more popular?
Googling 'define:popular' - regarded with great favor, approval, or affection especially by the general public - Widely used term, literally meaning of the people. Negatively, in contrast to high culture, art, etc. and as synonymous with mass So there could be a popular web testing technology and a high culture, artistic web testing technology. Should we strive to be an elite, high culture, artistic web testing tool or more of a tool for everyone that needs to test web applications? -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of Bret Pettichord Sent: Fri 9/15/2006 2:07 AM To: wtr-general@rubyforge.org Subject: [Wtr-general] Do you want Watir to be more popular? A couple of recent posts were premised on the assumption that we want Watir to be more popular? Do we? Why? It got me started on a long post describing my own goals, which needs more time. In the mean time, i thought i would ask the question to the group. Bret ___ Wtr-general mailing list Wtr-general@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/wtr-general <>___ Wtr-general mailing list Wtr-general@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/wtr-general
Re: [Wtr-general] Do you want Watir to be more popular?
On 9/15/06, Bret Pettichord <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > A couple of recent posts were premised on the assumption that we want > Watir to be more popular? Do we? Why? It seems like a dumb question. Of course we do? I can't think of any positive reason why you wouldn't want that to be so. I could understand why someone doing web consulting might not want his competitors to find out about it. WATIR is web testing Done Right. It is intuitive to developers. Testers might perceive it as being too complicated to mess with, but its easy to learn, and they are the people who most need a break like this. A recent, fairly ambitious WATIR test project I did, converted a weeks worth of utter drudge testing into a run-overnight-spend-the-next-morning -checking-results. I made a *lot* of friends there. ___ Wtr-general mailing list Wtr-general@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/wtr-general
[Wtr-general] Do you want Watir to be more popular?
A couple of recent posts were premised on the assumption that we want Watir to be more popular? Do we? Why? It got me started on a long post describing my own goals, which needs more time. In the mean time, i thought i would ask the question to the group. Bret ___ Wtr-general mailing list Wtr-general@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/wtr-general
