Tue, 25 Apr 2006

Watir, the Lazy Programmer's Friend

My current client was in need of a functional test suite for their web site to raise our confidence that we wouldn't break anything when we upgraded to Hibernate 3. Despite being a Selenium fan, I wanted to give Watir a try (for various reasons, it felt like a good fit). People were hesitant about the introduction of a new language (Watir is a web testing DSL in Ruby), but after I spent a day getting a bunch of test scenarios scripted, Watir proved its worth. Every developer I paired with said the same thing: "I'm never going to type into a browser again."

There were things I could do with Watir that I would be hard pressed to do with Selenium, like outsmarting CAPTCHA, abstracting common code by opening Watir::IE, and switching between dev, test, and staging by changing a single variable. That last point is one of the big wins of Watir over Selenium, you never touch the server, it's dead simple to setup. That said, the achilles heel of Watir is that it currently only runs on Windows and IE, while Selenium runs virtually anywhere on any browser. So I'll stick with Selenium for my Rails project on my MacBook, while Watir seems to be a good fit for our Windows workstations at my client site.

Abstracting common code into Watir::IE has worked beautifully so far. We created a WatirHelper module that includes code like this:

module Watir
  class IE
    def login_admin
      text_field(:name, "name").set("jerryQ")
      text_field(:name, "pass").set("bletch")
      button(:name, "Sumbit").click
    end

    def fill_out_problem_form(last_name, email)
      select_list(:name , "dateMonth").select("December")
      select_list(:name , "dateDay").select("25")
      select_list(:name , "dateYear").select("2008")
      
      text_field(:name, "firstName").set("F")
      text_field(:name, "lastName").set(last_name)
      text_field(:name, "email").set(email)
      text_field(:name, "confirmEmail").set(email)
    end
  end
end

require 'watir'
require 'watir_helper'
include Watir

# update this to point to any server you want
server_name = "localhost" 

ie = IE.new
ie.goto("http://#{server_name}/admin")
ie.login_admin
ie.link(:text, "Tell us your problem").click
ie.fill_out_problem_form("Foo", "foo@bar.org")
...
assert ...

But then I got tired of running scripts. I wanted a Watir dashboard. Ruby/Tk to the rescue! Here's my quick spike of how to drive Watir from a GUI.

require 'tk'
require 'watir_helper'

root = TkRoot.new { title "Dashboard" }
button = TkButton.new(root) do
  text "Start Google"
  command proc do
    ie = IE.new
    ie.goto("http://google.com/")
  end
end
button.pack
Tk.mainloop

[/projects/watir] permanent link

Just capture requirements as fake Ruby code

One of Kent Spillner's reflections on Rich Kilmer's talk at the Silicon Valley Ruby Conference...

He spent the first day on the project pairing with the domain expert, writing everything they said in Ruby assuming the DSL already existed, and then spent the remainder of the project back-filling what was needed to make the DSL work and building the UI. via Obie

[/dynamic] permanent link