Another Look at WatiN
At my current client, we’ve decided to use WatiN, largely for the C# vs. Ruby reason I discussed earlier this week. After spending a week working with WatiN (following a year of rarely using it), I’m impressed. Ruby and the active Watir community still have their advantages. But WatiN has really come into its own with C# 3.0 features like lambdas. I’m pleased with the test code we’re producing in terms of readability, speed, flexibility, and maintainability. I’ve proposed an Agile 2009 tutorial session on the patterns I’m using to get those results, and I’ll post more on that topic here soon. (Which will hopefully help with one of WatiN’s shortcomings—documentation.)
We’re using WatiN as much as possible, but have problems getting consistent behavior from environment to environment and have yet to effectively automate any of those tests. I introduced WatiN to the team and one of the developers went crazy with base classes and working the timeout, event pausing, and automated local data reset issues. When it works it’s valuable, but it’s hard keeping up with unit tests when they’re not automated. I think we also need to ease off the test count given the time it takes to run these tests, our heaviest data page fixture can take ~20 minutes to run.
Alex
25 Jan 09 at 5:31 pm
@Alex – I think that gets back to the importance of good patterns. With a powerful tool like WatiN, it’s easy to quickly build a suite of fragile, unmaintainable tests. Unfortunately, as I mentioned, the documentation around WatiN that would keep you from going in that direction is limited. I need to write more about this…
Richard
26 Jan 09 at 8:13 am
Hi Richard,
Pleased to read your new post on WatiN
If you happen to write “documentation” I’m more than willing to add it to the WatiN website (as well).
Regards,
Jeroen van Menen
Lead developer WatiN
Jeroen van Menen
4 Feb 09 at 9:10 am
@Jeroen – Thanks for the comments (and for creating a great tool!). I’m working on the first in a series of WatiN patterns posts right now. Once there are a few of those up, I’d appreciate a link from the WatiN website. Hope they’ll be a good resource for WatiN users.
Richard
4 Feb 09 at 3:19 pm