Watirgrid and Gridinit on Watir Podcast

May 5 11 under Altentee, Gridinit | Comments Off

As the title implies, I get to spend 15 minutes talking about Watirgrid and Gridinit on the Watir podcast.

This family of tools lets you easily distribute watir test cases onto a grid network, the latter being a commercial implementation on EC2 of the former. I’ll be posting more about Gridinit soon as we enter into our beta!

http://watirpodcast.com/44-tim-koopmans-on-watirgrid-and-gridinit/

Watir-Webdriver-Performance gem released

Apr 19 11 under Altentee | 5 Comments

Today I added a simple watir-webdriver-performance gem whose purpose is to collect performance metrics specified for web applications to access timing information related to navigation and elements.

User latency is an important quality benchmark for Web Applications. While JavaScript-based mechanisms can provide comprehensive instrumentation for user latency measurements within an application, in many cases, they are unable to provide a complete end-to-end latency picture.

To address the need for complete information on user experience, this document introduces the PerformanceTiming interfaces. This interface allows JavaScript mechanisms to provide complete client-side latency measurements within applications. With the proposed interface, the previous example can be modified to measure a user’s perceived page load time.

WatirGrid 1.0.6 released … can haz Selenium?

Apr 19 11 under Altentee | 1 Comment

I’ve just released WatirGrid 1.0.6 which now includes support for Selenium WebDriver… So can I really call it WatirGrid anymore? Realistically the Watir and Selenium projects are headed in the same direction courtesy of WebDriver, so it makes sense to give Watir users (I like to think of them as Ruby users ) the option to use Selenium where it best fits.

Watir Day and Selenium Conference .. w00t

Apr 8 11 under Altentee | Comments Off

Wow,

What an awesome experience. Despite spending most of it jet-lagged, travelling to San Francisco was such a great experience for me, and helped reaffirm just how strong the Watir and Selenium community is. Without dropping names, some of the experiences I got to enjoy were:

Sharing late night beers and early morning burgers with the leader of Watir development
Pair coding on watir-webdriver performance extensions with the smartest kid in Norway
Finally meeting perhaps the leader of Australian based Watir testing
Eating chinese with the god-father of Watir and hearing some great anecdotes on the origins of Selenium
Shown the light on page objects, opera and superbad with a Polish born American
Hearing about the inner workings of ‘that other browser’ from a genius at Opera
Learning more about the Watir community and getting a thirst for Croatian micro breweries
Meeting my role model in person and perhaps feeling a bit shied by his awesomeness!
Getting some great advice and tips for my own startup
Being awed and perhaps jealous (in a slightly convict vs. colonial way) of the greatest mind behind webdriver

I met many other people whilst there, did tons of late night coding and got to experience public speaking for the first time. A big thank you to all the organisers of #watirday and #seconf. Looking forward to the next!

Watir Day, WatirGrid and the GRIDinit.iative!

Apr 5 11 under Altentee | Comments Off

The last few days have been busy for me as I had the privilege to present WatirGrid at the Watirday conference in San Francisco. You can catch the slide deck here in case you couldn’t make it. WatirGrid lets you test Watir in parallel, why not give it a shot yourself?

<sudo> gem install watirgrid

I’m also attending the Selenium Conference which is giving me lots of great ideas and inspiration in the performance & automation space. It’s great to see a greater shift to open source testing tools and some may argue that QTP and the like perhaps could die a graceful death. It’s also been fun meeting the god-father of Selenium and confirming that his choice of product-name really was intended as an antidote to Mercury!