"Watir Web Application Testing in Ruby"

IndicThreads >> Could you tell us more about the functional software testing tool that you are involved in developing?

Jonathan Kohl >> I have been involved in Watir  Web Application Testing in Ruby. Bret Pettichord and Paul Rogers have done most of the development work, and deserve a lot of credit. Chris Morris who wrote the original IEController has also been involved. Watir is a Ruby library that facilitates testing web applications using Internet Explorer. Im also working to help start a new project that does the same thing with C#.

"Watir is a Ruby library that facilitates testing web applications using Internet Explorer..."

Watir came about because there were a few of us who were frustrated with these popular testing tools that were buggy and didnt do what we needed for testing web apps. We independently found that capture/replay didnt work well, and ended up using the tool as an IDE and writing our scripts by hand. Most tools had some proprietary language that had their share of problems as well. It was hard to get help, or bounce ideas off coworkers. Developers didnt want to touch these weird languages, and I would find myself working on solving problems alone. This whole rich community grew up around Perl and Python, and there were mailing lists, forums, all kinds of tools being written, and a great exchange of ideas.

"Open Source communities are wonderful spaces of collaboration..."

So we decided to take a real programming language, develop a web testing library that we could use ourselves, and make it freely available to anyone else who wanted to use it. Open Source communities are wonderful spaces of collaboration, so we benefited from a growing community who wanted to contribute to the tool to solve their own testing problems.

IndicThreads >>Interesting that you chose Ruby. Any particular reasons why you did that? Did you find Ruby better suited to the task?

Jonathan Kohl >> We chose Ruby because its a powerful scripting language, and it was something we all wanted to work in. Paul Rogers and I found we could get things done quickly and easily in Ruby, so we got hooked on the language quite early on.

"I found we could get things done quickly and easily in Ruby..."
"Ruby works the way I think about programming in a scripting language..."

Chris Morris and Bret Pettichord were big fans of the language, so we had some smart people who were willing to contribute. We could have just as easily chosen Perl or Python. I like to use Ruby because it works the way I think about programming in a scripting language. We also had a community of practice growing up around Ruby, which was important. We didnt know a group of like-minded people who were doing the same thing in Python or Perl.