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 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
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