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 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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>
>
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