Here are some testing related terms that people need to stop using.

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Ten years ago, the choice for open source UI Automation consisted primarily of Watir and Selenium. Many companies who chose Watir did so based on the way it automatically waited for a page to finish loading. As websites have become increasingly dynamic, the very notion of a page “finishing loading” no longer makes sense. As such, Watir has fallen behind in how it synchronizes tests with the page and has failed to keep on top of what was once a major competitive advantage.

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Watir needs to remove the Watir#always_locate feature toggle. Most people don’t use it and most of those who do will be unlikely to notice any differences at this point. This post is an overview of how Selenium and Watir view elements differently, how that has affected Watir’s code, and what Watir needs to do to address it.

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In the interview for the first development job I applied for, I asked my potential coworkers what they thought was most wrong with their process. They admitted to a significant disconnect between them and their quality team. They felt this resulted in a lot of knocking something out and “throwing it over the wall” for it to be tested and verified. Putting testers in a separate silo allows developers not to take responsibility for the quality of the code they write, which wastes time and resources. While it was laudable that the developers recognized this, I did not accept that job offer.

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When developers I meet find out that I’m a project owner for both Selenium and Watir, the reactions are often similar. Most of them don’t know what Watir is, but have heard of Selenium. All too often they also tell me that they or their companies have used Selenium before, but didn’t find enough value to continue using it. They are usually right; the way many companies do test automation the costs exceed the benefits.

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Welcome to my new blog. Check out the About page for the reason why I chose the name for this site. Over the past year there have been many things that I’ve wanted to share and discuss with friends and colleagues, but I have not had the means to do so. I’ve avoided starting a blog because I didn’t want to deal with the hassle of putting something together myself, and I couldn’t bring myself to use something completely off the shelf. Well, this particular hassle has been completely worthwhile because creating this blog, as basic as it is, has been a lot of fun, and I now know a lot more about Jekyll and Bootstrap, and I have exposed myself to a huge number of acronyms and projects that weren’t around 5 years ago. I’m looking forward to having a place to express my thoughts, but I’m also looking forward to learning more about these tools to make this site more useful.