Lessons Learned working with Ruby

NOTE: This page was added in April 2009.  It is under construction.  Feedback welcome.  Please just keep in mind that I know much needs to be updated here.  Thanks.

RUBY

1. Quick Overview

If you are interested in Ruby, there are many sites and resources available to help you learn more.  Some include:

• Wikipedia has a pretty good overview on the Ruby programming language
• Try Ruby (in your browser) is a very useful tool that helped me interactively figure out how a number of commands work.  If you have 15 minutes of free time, run through the tutorial on this page.
• The first edition of Programming Ruby (a.k.a. 'Pickaxe') is available online, and is packaged with Ruby in a convenient CHM file (for Windows users).
• If you get serious about Ruby, you should pick up a newer edition of the 'Pickaxe' book at the Pragmatic Bookshelf
• If you are an experienced scripter or prefer to learn by doing, I recommend Brian Marick's book "Everyday Scripting with Ruby".  It teaches you both what Ruby can do and good programming practices at the same time.
• When in doubt, you can always check out the comp.lang.ruby group for answers when you get stuck.
• Something a little different - check out Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby.  (Chunky bacon!)

There are many, many other libraries, frameworks and add-ons to Ruby that help it do just about anything.  Just look around.

2. Ruby Scripts

Examples of Scripts that I've written include:

• Session-Based Test Management scripts - ported from Perl to Ruby - see my SBTM Projects page for source code
• more coming soon..

3. Scripting Tips

Do you know the difference between single quotes and double quotes when working with strings in Ruby scripts?

..coming soon..
 

WATIR

1. Quick Overview

Some helpful Watir resources include:

• Wikipedia has an entry on Watir that might answer a few of your questions
• The main community home is on OpenQA.org - links to installation instructions, tutorials, articles, latest development builds, bug tracking tool and more.
• The main Watir General mailing list can now be found on Google Groups
• There are many blogs and articles out there related to Watir.  It really is the simple part of this whole setup, so I don't have much more to add here.

2. Test Framework Components

The foundation of testing web apps with Watir is made up of 3 parts:

1. Ruby is a powerful, easy-to-use object-oriented scripting language that runs on all the popular operating systems.  Best of all, it's free! 
2. Watir (pronounced 'water', not 'wa-teer') is a Ruby library used to automate Internet Explorer.  You install this separately.  It can be used to test all types of web applications (ASP, .Net, JSP, PHP, Rails, etc.)
3. Test/Unit framework or library comes with Ruby.  It provides: (1) the structure for the test methods/cases, (2) the assertions (i.e. verification check points), and (3) some built-in summary metrics on things like number of tests performed/failed and length of time to complete.

Download the Ruby and Watir one-click installers from: http://wtr.rubyforge.org/

The thing to note here is that many people test with Ruby all the time but don't use Watir (i.e. using just 1 & 3 above), and you can use the Watir library to talk to web apps without necessarily testing them.  There's flexibility in how those 3 elements above can be used together, separately, or interchanged with other components.  The above combination for the purpose of testing web apps from a user's perspective is the purpose I'm interested in here.

Depending on your particular testing project's needs, you might also need to use other Ruby libraries.  For example, to help you read/write to Excel spreadsheets, parse XML, or use an additional scripting framework - e.g. like RSPEC.

Have a question?  Think something is missing?  Drop me a line to let me know.

Contact me at: paul [at] staqs [dot] c o m