I am formally an Environmental Chemist, who in 1999 joined the ranks of Software Quality Assurance, which would be QA and not Q&A (pet peeve of one of my early mentors). I had very little programming experience other than some classes taken at Austin Community College and dabbling with HTML. My first exposure to a scripting language was the 4-Test Language used by Silk Performer and Silk Test. In a reasonable amount of time and some outstanding mentoring I picked the language up quickly. We were able to write some rather robust performance tests for the various applications we were responsible for. I recall the language was very strict and sometimes difficult to troubleshoot. I then attended the Silk Test certification courses. At the time I liked the power that Silk Test provided for functional testing. I was anxious to use Silk Test to help test our internationalized products by using a series of if statements and localized string content. No sooner than I got started on this project I was part of a “reduction in force”. The one thing I definitely remember is that the Segue suite of tools came with a healthy price tag.

Fortunately I landed a position with a start up company, who was test-driven and Agile. Here is where we implemented some extremely powerful methods using Webload. Webload was a terrific tool in that we could leverage performance tests as functional tests. We developed the testing methods almost as fast as the application was built. Sometime in 2002 Webload changed their application to be more GUI focused. The end result was this rendered many of our previously developed scripts almost useless. There were certain things we struggled with using 5.2 and these things were addressed in 6.0, but the trade off of redeveloping all of our scripts was huge. The bottom line was we never got back to the level of scripts we needed to be efficient at testing our product line application. In September of 2004, I decided to abandon Webload and continue our search for the Holy Grail of testing tools. I played with Open STA, Load Runner, and some emerging technology called WATIR, Web Application Testing in Ruby. Open STA was difficult to get off the ground. I do not recall the specifics, but it was quickly abandoned. I got a temporary license for using Load Runner. This was an awesome tool, but like other great tools came with a significant price tag. Well no sooner than I got my first WATIR script written I was again victim to a “reduction in force”.

I was fortunate and landed my current Gig. There was not much time early on for me to dive into test automation. I had to put my head to the grind stone and learn the testing environments and a robust application. My new mentor threw me to the wolves. The QA team was responsible for maintaining and configuring their test environment. My first challenge was to install AIX and get our application up and running. Definitely I felt like ex-prize fighter, Terry, the main character of “On the Water Front”. I took some serious blows, but after some hand holding I got it done. Now I just pray that the AIX machine does not crash! Once my domain knowledge was up to par, there was time for some automated test development. We were told to use an internal tool, Easy Test. This testing tool is content–driven using a table structure. It is really a powerful testing tool for both web and enterprise based applications. My two brain cells for the longest time just did not get it. I think the main reason was that I did not have the time to fully dive in and learn the tool. We were releasing a new product every 3-4 weeks, which left very little time for test automation. Once again there was a changing of the guard, but this time I was extremely fortunate to remain a member of a great Professional Services team. We developed a new application and right from the start we wanted to have test-driven development. WATIR was a logical choice.

The development team was excited about the potential of WATIR. We immediately hit a snag with WATIR’s ability to handle modals and pop ups. I struggled for a couple of weeks to no avail. I quickly abandoned WATIR and dove into Easy Test. Easy Test handled modals, pop ups, and even desktop file exchanges like a champion. I do not intend to do a line by line comparison of these two tools here, but I can summarize by saying I now have two very good weapons in my bag of tricks. My brain kept leading me back to WATIR. WATIR seemed to come more naturally to me. I still had not conquered the modal issue, so I asked a seasoned developer to take a look at it. In a couple of days she pointed out the flaws in my approach and I was back to using WATIR. Today we are using WATIR. As time permits I will share some additional challenges and thoughts on using WATIR as our main tool for functional testing. Most likely I will find time about once a week to post a thought or two on the trials and tribulations of WATIR.