Non-programmer Testwise users, am I missing something? Is this tool not for non-coder after all?

[Tracy Benton]

I am not a programmer. I am a longtime manual/exploratory QA person. I got permission from my boss to spend a week educating myself a little bit by using the Practical Web Test Automation book and the Testwise community edition. 

I struggled for a couple of days and finally got everything correctly installed (it seemed like there were contradictory instructions about what you needed to install). I got through quite a few of the exercises. I was feeling hopeful. 

As soon as I swapped over from the Agileway Travel website for the exercises to our own website, I was stopped dead. I got errors telling me that the script couldn't locate the first field (Unable to locate element, using {:tag_name=>["text", "password", "textarea"], :name=>"ct100$MiddleSection$TxtUserName"}). I have just spent three hours trying to figure out what else it could be called, since when I inspect the element, that is indeed what it is named. 

I was under the impression I didn't need to know programming in order to use this tool, but I can't find any more-simply-written supporting documentation on the tool to help me past this big stop sign. And if I can't get past this, I certainly can't recommend to my boss that we pursue a non-free version of it. 

Am I just wrong in thinking you'd have to know coding to figure this out? 

Thanks for your advice

[Zhimin]

First of all, to master test automation, in my opinion, certain level of programming skill is must. They so-called scriptless and record-n-playback test automation tool has been around for over decades. The fact of Selenium WebDriver dominates web browser testing proves that (Selenium WebDriver comes with five different language bindings).  If no programming, I don't think test automation is possible, and definitely no fun  doing test automaton.

PWTA book is a guide to develop maintainable test scripts (maintainable test design + test refactoring), and it requires efforts to get familiar with Selenium WebDriver as well. Are you reading the latest version of PWTA. In second edition, I use Selenium WebDriver with TestWise Pro. If you spotted mistakes in the book, I would like to hear it. (you may use contact author on Leanpub).  

In terms of tools, I used TestWise to introduce test refactoring in the book, I maintain thousands of tests daily using TestWise.  Selenium WebDriver is text-based and open-source, testers are free to use any tool/IDE/plugins, but the main point I want to highlight here is productivity. When we dealing a large number of automated tests, with any changes can break many tests, extreme high efficiency is critical.  If you find a tool/editor/IDE that you (and more importantly, your team)  are comfortable with maintaining test scripts, go for it. That is the beauty of freedom.