If you went through the first part of my experiential case study, you’ll know that I ended up creating a few tests that used Watir-WebDriver to execute logic against a web site. While I managed to get some output from those tests, it wasn’t the best looking output in terms of readability. Partly that was design, of course. After all, I could have made better output simply by considering how my tests should return success or failure information. Ideally, though, I would create some sort of modularized reporting functionality as part of my framework. This module would do nothing but handle the outputting of test results. That’s certainly a worthwhile thing to focus on, but you might also consider other solutions. As I mentioned at the close of the previous post, one such framework has already been written to handle this, which is RSpec.

Sometimes it can be hard to get started with open source automated testing. The documentation is usually on the bad side of horrible. Further, many of the tools were written by developers with a development focus in mind, which is different from those tools developed by testers. Even when you do find technical people that are able to describe how to use something well, the context for using the tool may not be what you are looking for. I certainly found this when I started out wanting to use Watir, WebDriver, and RSpec. You can spend a lot of time looking through various Wiki pages or blog posts to figure out the bits of information you need to eventually have a fully working solution.

And that can be really annoying. And yet here I am apparently offering yet another blog post covering the stuff. What I’m doing here is presenting the information I wish I had when I started out. I provide a little historical detail, a lot of implementation detail, and some reference information behind the implementation.