Watir and the Testing of Test Tools (Selenium Follow-up)

Honestly, I hate being sick... having a cold in the middle of a scorching summer and no AC sucks like no other experience. Being sent home by caring (read, scared of catching) co-workers, I swelter in 35+ degree weather and sneezing every other minute and finally drop into a dazed nap about late afternoon.

What does this have to do with Selenium and investigating other Testing Tools? And am I posted in my delirium? Hope not... Anyways, the point is instead of waiting in vain for an answer to my Selenium questions OR continuing to creating new Selenium scripts for the latest iteration of our web application in the method that I admittedly feel might be less than ideal [HTML documents as scripts], I fall asleep and go in and out of a doze until late tonight - and wake up to new options. Hence my post in the wee hours of the night:

Jason Huggins posted a response to my question on the Selenium mailing lists. It gives me instructions to try to correct the issues I'm facing with the Selenium Server implementation. niice, thanks Jason!

Encouraged by this good news, I move on to my RSS feeds. And Scott Hanselman has a very timely entry on his "search for the holy grail of automated web UI testing"... That's what I call great timing.

Scott's post provides a brief overview of similar tools including Selenium and NunitASP(being a .Net shop, we looked at this too). So Watir is Scott's endorsed tool - at least for right now. Scott includes a link to another article comparing Selenium with Watir, so the hits just keeps on coming. My first reaction was: 'I wish I'd seen this article back in April when Selenium caught my attention'. But giving it more consideration, I had only started playing with Ruby at the time, and probably would have shied away from Watir because of it. Selenium was exactly the tool we needed for the time we had. But now Selenium's need to be installed with the app is my biggest headache.

In short, Watir was designed for ease of use—but with the expectation that its users will be programming (rather than recording). Originally intended as a teaching tool, it was acceptable for the tool to be limited to IE and Windows. Selenium was designed for breadth of coverage. It was expected to be used by the same developers who built the application, so it’s biggest—that it be installed with the application under test—was acceptable.

So I find that at this point I'm drawn to exploring Watir as a new option - the ease of use and non-requirement not to be installed with the AUT makes the learning curve seem worthwhile, and the Ruby implementation is no longer the deterrent it would have been a few months back. Does this mean that Selenium is now shelved? necessarilyrily, it only means that I'll have another project for my 'spare time'. yipee thanks Scott! Okay, back to my summer cold and misery...