[Wtr-general] Including Features of Universally used commercial test automation tools.

[Charley Baker]

Hi Jatinder,

   One of the best ways to contribute is to follow the mailing list and
post. I've answered some of your points below:

On 7/17/06, Jatinder Singh <jatinder.saundh at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I have spent around 2+ years working with Test Automation tools,
> specifically Rational Robot, Rational XDE Tester(now known as RFT).
> I was looking through the features of WATIR tool and found it lacking some
> good features of commercial tool(may be I overlooked them).
> May be I found following missing,
> 1. objects maps(so that there is centralized repositry of object
> definations)
>

Object maps are easy to create in Ruby, you might look at a previous thread
in the last few days on UI Mapping:
http://www.mail-archive.com/wtr-general%40rubyforge.org/msg04233.html

2. Verification points.
>

Take a look at the Watir user guide which lists one way of doing this
through Test Unit Assertions: http://wtr.rubyforge.org/watir_user_guide.html

3. Inbuilt Logging mechanisms.(this feature many projects ignore, but I
> believe this is the most important feature as logs are what finally to be
> seen)
>

Watir has a logger built into it which has a default logger subclass that
writes to STDERR. You can use ie.log(message) if you want to use the default
logger, you can override with your own logger by using the ruby standard
logging library:
http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/logger/rdoc/index.html

4. Managing Tests.
>

There are several ways to do this, see below for a link to WET.

5. Inbuilt keyword driven testing(a DSL to let test writers write tests
> without writing ruby code)
>

Several people have done this,  again see below for a link to WET or take a
look at Systir which is a basic framework to accomplish this.
http://atomicobject.com/systir.page

6. Recording tool. (I am not sure if it really does not exist in WATIR
> world)
>
Recording tools are of dubious use, you can search the mailing list for some
discussion about automation recording tools. There are a couple of recording
tools that were made for Watir, most of us find them to be unnecessary in
general.


Apart from above there are some pain areas with various automation tools.
> such things should not be repeated in WATIR.
>


Watir is designed to be a base automation library able to be used by a
framework. With Ruby as it's scripting language, it is designed to be as
extensible as you'd like it to be. If you're looking for an example of an
already built framework around Watir, you might want to take a look at WET
which has many of the points you've listed above:
http://www.openqa.org/wet/

Suggestions, questions and feedback are of course always welcome. I hope
that helps.

-Charley

>From my past expereince, I have few suggestions and I would be glad to share
> and contribute to WATIR project.
>
> Please let me know the process/procedure for contributing to WATIR
> project.
>
> Regards,
> Jatinder
>
>
>
>
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>
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