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 [email protected] http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/wtr-general
