me.andering

I’ve been looking (and still am, but less) for a simple solution to test-drive website development with browser integration. Rob Westgeest pointed me to Firewatir. Firewatir is a Ruby wrapper around Firefox through the JSSH shell extension.

Firewatir is new and still under development, but looks promising to me, as it fullfills the four R’s: Easy to Read, (w)Rite, Run and Refactor. The only thing that is required is a firefox plugin for JSSH and a ruby library (installable through rubygems). Current downsides are scant documentation and the test process seems to hang sometimes. We also had to make some extensions to start Firefox automatically under linux (Firewatir was originally made for windows). The scant documentation you can get around if you read the tests.

We had a session on browser testing at Agile Open Europe this week. Apparently, links to Firewatir and its (scant) documentation are not that easy to find from some countries.

• Introduction to FireWatir
• Posts on FireWatir in Angrez’s blog (the developer)
• Download page for FireWatir, manual and JSSH extension

Hope this helps to make them easier to find. I’d be curious to know what you are going to use it for

The second continuous integration & testing conference (still labeled conference, still Open Space) is taking place in London, October 6 and 7, which is a bit closer to me than last years’ in Chicago. I’ve heard good things about CITCON (don’t know exactly what…) and as continuous integration and integration and acceptance testing are still areas with lots of development and challenges, this is bound to be interesting again.

This would also be the first conference announcement I got through a comment on this blog, so the organisers have an interesting approach to marketing at least .

Oh, and did I mention this conference is free (as in free beer)? - it would also be free as in free software, as the contents are up to you, the potential participants…

Continuous Integration and Testing Conference April 7-8, 2006 - Chicago, IL, USA. I won’t be able to attend, but this open space event might be worth your while. I don’t know the organisers, but they seem to know themselves pretty well :

“Jeffrey and Paul have been planning the conference for more than 9 months and feel that just doing it is better than languishing in analysis paralysis. Early April was targetted as a good time.”

I hope next year Jeffrey and Paul will call it an unconference. At the agile open last year we had some participants who had missed the fact there was no conference program. On the other hand, most of the CITCON site is about open space and the open space rules
Through Lasse’s weblog - CITCON in Chicago