What place should Watir be given in our QA department?

[alexande...@finntech.no]

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Our QA department is going from hiring students to do manual testing of
our website, to test automation. We are still researching and
experimenting, but have to decide where to go soon.

We've written many tests in Watir now, and are pretty happy with it;
except it's slow. I ask myself, is using IE really necessary for
any/most of our tests? Why not some kind of GUI-less HTTP-only
framework?

We need to decide what we actually want to test, and then get the right
tool for the right job.

Do you guys have any general thoughts (or URLs) on
* What should be tested (automatically) on a website?
* With what tool or framework?
* What kind of testing is Watir best suited for?

I'd love some names and links on testing tools / frameworks we could try
out. Preferably Ruby or Java.

--
Alexander

[Max Russell]

I am all for automated regression of tests but I feel it can lack in two
ways:

1 ) If you need to quickly test something new, a script can be more
laborious than a quick visual test.

2 ) Automated tests only verify the conditions they are asked to.
However, a tester sat in front of a browser would test those conditions
and also pick up on other details.

Max

[Michael Badger]

I've recently had the same problem to solve. Basically, I use Watir to
regression test and alert me to problems at the beginning of a test
cycle or prior to customer release.

My test suite currently touches around 240 pages. I haven't found any of
my testers to be able to compete with the objectivity and speed of the
Watir tests. Of course, automated tests only check the conditions I
specify.

I also automate tests that have proven to be hard for us to manually
test maccurately. For example, our app uses role based security, so I
automate security checks in about 8 combinations depending on the type
of page. Another human testing problem for us is concurrent edits. I
start two IE browsers and try to simultaneously edit a page.

For new development, bug fixes, and one off tests, I manually test.

Regards,
Mike