Does cucumber suck?
August 31, 2010
I’ve been having a lot of rants about Cucumber of late, as it’s the new shiny thing for agile teams. Does anyone else have issues with it? I’ve asked all of my programmer friends to convince me of its worth, and they’ve all failed so far. I’ve not seen it adding any value above building […]
Record and playback with Watir script recorders
August 18, 2010
A frequently asked question for Watir seems to be whether there are any “record and playback” tools. While most of the references point to a somewhat old tool, two viable alternatives seem much harder to find for some reason. The first is Webmetrics‘ Global Watch Script recorder, available at http://www.webmetrics.com/products/script_recorder.html The second, is CubicTest. This […]
Automating Flash, AJAX, Popups and more using Ruby, Watir and Sikuli
August 16, 2010
Jonathan Kohl pointed me at Sikuli, a Python-based tool for automating applications using image recognition. Unlike most tools, which attempt to identify objects via public APIs, Sikuli looks at the pixels on the screen and attempts to identify objects based on how they look. This isn’t exactly a new approach, as commercial tools have had […]
Do you know what happens when the power goes off?
This news article where a hairdresser’s client went bald after a power loss in the salon reminded me of a test I frequently forget to run. Power off your system or server while in the middle of testing and look for problems. You’ll most frequently find issues if you aim for a power outage – […]
The state of Ruby versions
August 10, 2010
As much as I love using Ruby, it’s become more frustrating over time. Developers are feeling this, and as a tester, I’ve had my share as well. This article, passed on by James Ladd sums things up for me (for testing, as well as development). The best example of this in the Watir space is […]
Symbolic links in Windows XP
August 5, 2010
I was surprised to learn today that symbolic links are possible in Windows XP. I’m not sure I’ll use them that often, but it will help me in replicating some linux build environment instructions. Though not supported out of the box, you can download the tool that makes it happen at Microsoft’s sysinternals website. I […]
When security goes too far…
August 3, 2010
Safe from hackers, safe from users. Movable type takes Captcha to the next level!
Watir popup examples not working (and a solution, finally)
July 26, 2010
I’ve been finding popups in Watir a pain of late, with most of the solutions on watir.com not working for me. Finally today, I found something that worked. Steve Swanson’s solution did the trick. However, before it could work, I had to figure out that the AutoIT dll wasn’t correctly registered. If you try the […]
Feedback is nice. Good feedback is even nicer.
July 1, 2010
Today I found out that my post on Watir and TinyMCE let someone dump their Quick Test Pro licences. A victory for common sense… Nothing against QTP, but if you’re testing web applications, you should probably be looking at other tools.
Things are even worse…
June 10, 2010
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