On 11/7/06, John Lolis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Watir/Ruby scripts (if well designed) seem to be very easy to support. Is > that also the case with QTP?
Don't know about QTP, but I remember Winrunner was laughable. I would guess if you are using VBScript & JavaScript as your test script languages they would be inferior to support. They can't hold a candle Ruby/WATIR DSL. Strictly speaking if QTP is using the same mechanism as WATIR to control IE, it is on the right track - the two tools are using the correct testing approach and DOM level control of the browser makes for very robust tests. Don't forget the power that comes with being able to drop down into Ruby for more hardcore testing. As part of a recent test effort where we needed to automatically test event generation of a software product with a Web UI, we used WATIR/AutoIT to control a windows simulator that drove our product, then used WATIR to configure the app, and validate when its UI changed, and dropped down into Ruby when we needed to check that mails were sent. We used a locally installed test mail server and parsed the .eml files on the local machine. But we could also have used Ruby's POP3 or SMTP libraries to validate if the mails were present on an external mail server. We could have used the same principle for querying syslog server entries, validating SNMP traps and a pile of other stuff. The most amazing thing was that it all worked pretty well and the tests were very robust. Basically WATIR being written in Ruby is an advantage, as it gives you more test capability than either VBScript or JavaScript. Our testers were quite impressed with it, and though Ruby was quite different to what they were familiar with, the amount of Ruby that they need to know to use WATIR is very little indeed. WATIR negatives - testing of non-english Unicode pages could be tricky, its an area that a professional product like QTP could pull ahead (as I don't see how the hell you could SELL a product without multinational support). Also the reporting aspect. You are on your own when it comes to making test reports. You can use the Ruby log functionality or roll your own, but in reality you probably want something much better than that, something built-in with good HTML reports, or export into portable formats like CSV. Anyone who has used a good unit test coverage tool knows what I mean. Without the reports aspect, WATIR is biased towards developers rather than testers. _______________________________________________ Wtr-general mailing list [email protected] http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/wtr-general
