Watir to run my smoke and regression tests

I have been looking for a tool to drive my web sites smoke and regression test for quite a while, between the tools I used I want to mention Sahi and Selenium, really good tools.

In the company I’m working right now we have a framework that is used by several companies to drive their websites. They can change the skinning a little bit but all the sites have the same structure and there a minimum of artifacts that remain from page to page (even when they look different).

Trying to test this with Selenium wasn’t easy, since I don’t want to create a complete suite of test for each site, I need to modify the test suite after it was created and imported on the language of choice. At that moment a disconnect is produced between the tester using the recorder and whoever will maintain the test code.

So I decided that we needed something different, some kind of scripting tool to drive the test. I took a look a Watir a year ago or so and at that time it was mostly IE specific. That was a deal breaker for me. Recently I decided to initiate the search once more and I found out that Watir now come with FireWatir integrated so it can drive both IE and Firefox and also there is Safariwatir to run test against Safari.

So, I downloaded, installed and run it. It was quite simple and I enjoyed that uses Ruby as the language to create test. In a few minutes I was able to put together a very simple test to log into our site and log out, interacting with some AJAX in the process.

Please note that my Ruby is quite basic and it was my first time using the Watir library. A few more minutes and I was able to refactor the test to load username, password, site domain and browser from a YAML file. So now I can have a configuration file and a single test that will run against as many sites (domains really) I want, with as many different users, even invalid one.

The next step is to encapsulate this functionality in a library and them use either RSpec or TestUnit to drive the tests and generate a report. So far I’m very excited and enjoying it.