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There are many speculations regarding Ruby (the programming language) and it’s ready-ness for enterprise use. The other day, a colleague of mine found an absolutely sweet spot: Automated testing via the browser interface.

Watir stands for “Web Application Testing in Ruby”, you write a few lines of Ruby that fires up Internet Explorer, and then clicks around, fills in form fields, submits, etc.

My colleague used a couple of hours to write a few lines to integration test a complex system for a financial customer. He modified it to repeat the same test in three different environments and via timers found out that one of the environments performed very badly.

I saw my colleague demo it yesterday, and both testers and developers present were absolutely impressed by the jar-dropping demo. Comments: “We could have used this much earlier”, “Despite that I don’t know Ruby, It’s easy to understand what it does”. Everybody in the project room went around smiling (David Heinemeier would probably say “happy”)

It’s nothing new that automated browser testing can be done, but when I ask about the alternatives, I’m told that they’re too complex to get started with, and sometimes take forever to set up.

Watir gets started with just four lines of code:

[code lang=”ruby”]require ‘watir’
require ‘watir/WindowHelper’
include Watir

ie = IE.new
ie.goto(test_site) [/code]

In my opinion, Watir + Ruby is a winnner. So easy to get started. So great payoff for a small amount of time invested. Jaw-dropping reactions on developers and testers that don’t even know Ruby. It’s a definite winner.

Technorati Tags: ruby, enterprise, business case, watir

This entry was posted by Jesper Rønn-Jensen on Friday, July 14th, 2006 at 11:18 (GMT-1) and is filed under Businesscase. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.