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    Tag: WatiN

    Debugging Cuke4Nuke Step Definitions

    At a client today, we were doing some tricky automation with WatiN (against Telerik controls) in Cuke4Nuke. We wanted to dig into what WatiN was…

    Richard Lawrence 2010-01-12
    10 Comments

    How to Remove Duplication in Cucumber Tests Using Scenario Outlines

    Gojko Adzic has a new blog post demonstrating the new table parameter support in Cuke4Nuke. Table parameters are an important part of Cucumber. They’re great…

    Richard Lawrence 2010-01-04
    2 Comments

    The Latest on Cuke4Nuke

    This morning, I released version 0.3.0 of Cuke4Nuke. With this release, Cuke4Nuke supports almost everything you can do with Cucumber in Ruby or Java, making…

    Richard Lawrence 2009-12-30
    3 Comments

    Screencast: Testing Web Applications in .NET with Cuke4Nuke and WatiN

    Yesterday, I released Cuke4Nuke 0.2.2, which added WatiN compatibility and an example of how to use the two tools together. Here’s a short screencast in…

    Richard Lawrence 2009-12-03
    8 Comments

    WatiN Patterns #3: Don’t Over-specify

    After a long hiatus, I’m resuming the WatiN Patterns series. Pattern #1 covered why and how your tests should clean up after themselves. Pattern #2…

    Richard Lawrence 2009-10-30
    3 Comments

    WatiN Patterns #2: One Assertion and a Name to Match

    One way to keep your WatiN tests maintainable is to keep them small and focused. WatiN Pattern #2, then, is a way to do just…

    Richard Lawrence 2009-02-11
    2 Comments

    WatiN Patterns #1: No Browser Left Behind

    In my previous posts on WatiN, I lamented the shortage of online documentation and resolved to do something about it by documenting the patterns I’ve…

    Richard Lawrence 2009-02-04
    2 Comments

    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…

    Richard Lawrence 2009-01-24
    10 Comments

    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…

    Richard Lawrence 2009-01-19
    3 Comments

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    Forum Description

    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...

    WatiN

    Pros Cons
    • Code and test in the same language (e.g. C#)
      • No need to learn a new language (i.e. Ruby)
      • No need to support another language
      • No need to hire people who know another language
    • Did I mention that you can write tests in C#?
    • IE only (though there's a CTP for FireFox support)
    • Very limited documentation
    • More syntactic noise (more due to .NET than to WatiN itself; e.g. new Regex("txtFoo$") vs. /txtFoo$/)

    Watir

    Pros Cons
    • Very active community
    • Active ongoing development on Watir and related projects
    • Good support on the discussion list
    • Concise, clear syntax (more due to Ruby than to Watir itself)
    • Good documentation (though finding the current RDoc online can be difficult)
    • Works with Cucumber, my current favorite acceptance test tool
    • Supports multiple browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari, and soon Chrome and Opera)
    • Uses a language unfamiliar to .NET teams (that's who we're talking about here, remember)
    • Doesn't directly work with .NET test frameworks (of course, you can wrap the Watir tests for use by MSTest or NUnit)

    The Bottom Line

    On balance, I think Watir is the better tool, has the better documentation, the most active community, and the best long-term prospects. But I understand the desire to standardize on C# or VB.NET for both production and test code. The long-term cost of adding another language to a product is not something to ignore. Personally, I'll continue to use and teach both tools with clients. When it comes to my own projects, however, I'll be using and extending Watir, for all the reasons above and simply because I enjoy working with Ruby. Which do you use and why?

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