WATIR vs. SilkTest: Your experiences, please

[Stan Taylor]

Hi Group,

I am a QA architect for Borland. I've used SilkTest for a decade (long
before I started working for Borland), and I've dabbled in WATIR off
and on. I'm not affiliated with the group in Borland that develops
SilkTest, but I'd love to gather some info to give to that group to
help make SilkTest better.

If you have experience with SilkTest, I would love to hear the
specifics of why you think WATIR is better.

Please try not to list the reasons why you think WATIR is better than
proprietary tools in general. Those differences are already well known
and documented (here, for instance:
http://groups.google.com/group/watir-general/browse_thread/thread/fd63e4415da128f2/).

I'm looking more for SilkTest-specific comparisons. For example: with
WATIR, you don't have to maintain anything like the window
declarations in SilkTest.

Thanks, Stan

[Louis Wilson]

Stan,

 

I like WATIR because I can have VBA (behind Excel) write WATIR scripts for me, then fire off Ruby to execute them.  Of course, I can have it write Silk scripts too, but with Silk I have to cut and paste the resulting scripts into SilkTest to execute them. 

 

Also, with Ruby/WATIR, I find it quite easy to have the results pasted back into Excel from the back end rather than having to flip to an open Excel window and poke it in the front.

 

Also, I find my WATIR scripts run quite a bit faster, and can be run in the background while I'm doing something else on the computer.  With SILK, my scripts get VERY CRANKY if I touch the computer while they're running.  It may be that because I'm talking to the DOM with WATIR and not with SILK, I get this result, but I don't know how to do that with SILK.

 

OTOH there are other people where I work who don't like doing it the way I do...

 

You might ask Alan Ark on this board for his opinion, he uses both.

 

Lou Wilson

KRONOS

[Bret Pettichord]

I thought i would chime in with a tangential comment. Specifically, I
think it is interesting to note that it would be illegal for us to have
a similar conversation about Quick Test Pro. The last time I checked the
license agreement for that product prohibited any reviews or comparative
comments about it without prior approval from Mercury. I also understand
that this clause allowed Mercury to kill some books that people had
written about WinRunner. Not sure if HP is continuing this policy or not.

Bret

[Željko Filipin]

On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 5:17 AM, Bret Pettichord <br...@pettichord.com> wrote:
> Not sure if HP is continuing this policy or not.

Maybe we should find out, because we have a wiki page called Comparison of Watir with Silk Test.

http://wiki.openqa.org/display/WTR/Comparison+of+Watir+with+Silk+Test

Željko
--
ZeljkoFilipin.com

[l...@gluefish.com]

Interestingly, it WAS a Borland employee that requested our comments.

Incidentally, regarding the policy of Mercury regarding their
prohibition of reviews - I don't recall that that has ever been tested
in court. A respondent would presumably use "fair use" of limited
content, a concept of the limitation of copyright that has withstood
centuries of challenge.

What I think is pertinent here is that the contract between Mercury
and its licensees prohibits is for the LICENSEE to write or allow a
review of the product. I don't think they could successfully chase
down a third party, presuming the third party had the financial
backing to mount a legal defense against a major corporation.

Of course that's a major consideration these days.

[aidy lewis]

hi, i used qtp for 4 months and nearly killed myself. took all night
to run 50 tests and sometimes bombed out. do you know selenium was
called selenium as it is a known antidote to mercury poisoning?

--
Aidy
www.agiletester.co.uk

[Bret Pettichord]

aidy lewis wrote:
> hi, i used qtp for 4 months and nearly killed myself. took all night
> to run 50 tests and sometimes bombed out. do you know selenium was
> called selenium as it is a known antidote to mercury poisoning?
>

actually, i did. i was the project manager for the selenium launch (i
was the director of testing at thoughtworks at the time) and was talking
to jason huggins (the inventor of selenium) about what to call the new
tool. he had a list of names, with selenium on it, and i selected it as
the perfect name and championed it within the company. he wanted to put
the mercury poisoning fact on our website, but i insisted that we not
publish this on our website or in our presentations, but rather let it
spread through word of mouth. now it has come back full circle.

[Lisa Crispin]

I did not know that fact and it's hilarious!

Was just out at STAREAST and Dietmar Strasser did a compelling presentation on Borland's agile efforts, I definitely salute them for that. It's exciting to see tool vendors embracing agile (IBM also) and it can only be good for the tools. (I hope!)

There were lots of folks there using Watir and it was nice to hear what people are doing, and to contribute our own experiences. It seems pretty much the mainstream tool nowadays, for good reason.
-- Lisa

--
Lisa Crispin
Co-author with Janet Gregory, Agile Testing
http://www.agiletester.ca
http://lisa.crispin.home.att.net

[Bret Pettichord]

FYI

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dave McNulla <mcn...@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Jun 7, 2008 at 7:33 PM
Subject: Re: [wtr-general] WATIR vs. SilkTest: Your experiences, please
To: Bret Pettichord <br...@pettichord.com>

I finally got around to checking. The license still seems to be worded
the same.

Dave

--
Bret Pettichord
CTO, WatirCraft LLC
Lead Developer, Watir, http://wtr.rubyforge.org
Blog (Essays), http://www.io.com/~wazmo/blog
MiniBlog (Links), http://feeds.feedburner.com/bretshotlist