Archive for the ‘Watir’ tag
How to Give a Great Sprint Demo
Exciting. Entertaining. Do these words describe your sprint demo meetings? Or are boring and unfocused more accurate?
I can’t believe how many times I’ve come in to coach a team and they’ve been surprised when I actually expected to see a software demo in the sprint demo meeting. As the agile principle says, “Working software is the primary measure of progress.” Let’s see some software!
Why are so many agile teams so hesitant to do demos? Why are demos so lifeless? Sometimes, the team’s not actually done. That makes a demo awkward. Other times, they can’t communicate what they did to the Product Owner; they don’t speak “business.” But most often, they simply don’t know how to give a good demo.
So, how do you give a good demo? Read on to find out »
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.)
Web Testing for .NET Teams: WatiN or Watir?
I’ve noticed a pattern with several of my .NET clients who want to get into automated acceptance testing for web applications. They like the idea of WatiN because it would let them write tests in the same language as their production code. But then they notice that there’s much more documentation and apparently a much more active community around Watir. And that Ruby language looks interesting too. What to do?
I think there are good arguments for both. Here are the major pros and cons from my perspective…
A Common, but Bad, Idea
Please don’t do this:

