It's been about a year since we decided to start using Webtest, so let me see if I can remember our reasoning at the time.
1) Record and Playback is a Bad Idea. Not everyone might agree, but my experience with record & playback has generally been negative. For any application that's even remotely dynamic, the time spent fiddling with the tests after the record phase tends to offset the time saved by recording. Better yet, since there is no modularization, the tests end up being a nightmare to maintain. 2) Free as in Beer. While buying a commercial product was an option, our budget was never unlimited (whose is?) and no commercial products offered any real incentive to spend the thousands of dollars. 3) XML (or better yet, simple readable XML) is a plus. We had the (rather vague) intention of writing test plans at an even higher level than the Webtest syntax, and generating the XML for it programmatically. That never happened, and Ant can be a really awkward way to do more complicated logic, but XML remains nice. 4) Integration into a nightly build. Tools like Selenium run inside a web browser (I have yet to actually try Watir after all this time, but the description on their home page sounds like to does the same thing). I just can't see opening IE windows during an unattended nightly run as a reliable way to get anything done. Other tools run inside a GUI. As it is, Webtest = Ant = CruiseControl = relatively painless nightly build. 5) It Just Works. My first superficial attempt at using Webtest while evaluating it was successful; I ran into problems with Selenium pretty quickly. I don't want to have to fight with my tools. 6) Excellent reporting. Forget all the other reasons, I think this is actually the part that sold me: the results are extremely informative, easy to read without extensive training, and they even look good. In the nearly a year we've been using it, I can think of a couple more reasons: - It still Just Works. It has been remarkably robust, mature, and bug-free. - This mailing list has provided excellent support. - It has scaled well. There have been some growing pains (out of memory exceptions forced us to break up the run into several parts). I don't know an exact number of steps, but last night's run, for example, has saved a total of 34,000 response pages. - We've been able to modify the runners and the reports slightly to suit our needs better (again, Webtest = Ant is nice). I wouldn't automatically recommend Webtest to everyone, since other products have both advantages and disadvantages over it. It does remain the best option for our needs. Alex -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Marc Guillemot Sent: Thursday, November 23, 2006 10:44 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Webtest] Why do you use WebTest? ;-) Hi all, why do you use WebTest rather than some other test tool (commercial or open source)? Of course I have some ideas on this question ;-) but as WebTest committer I'm surely not objective when comparing WebTest to others. While presenting WebTest I've already encountered difficulties to convince that it was the tool of choice. I think that it occurs particularly when people don't have any real experience of automated web application tests and therefore can't understand "real" arguments. From your experience as WebTest user, what would you say to persuade someone wanting to start test automation for a webapp to use WebTest rather than something else? Marc. _______________________________________________ WebTest mailing list [email protected] http://lists.canoo.com/mailman/listinfo/webtest _______________________________________________ WebTest mailing list [email protected] http://lists.canoo.com/mailman/listinfo/webtest
