Watir, Cucumber and some random thoughts

The day was really good. Apart from feeling sick. And being sick.

For me it seems that we have done something right. Seems that you have learned some valuable lessons. We all have. What I learned together with the group contains

• how important it is to close the browser after each test case.
• how important it would be to clean up the database after each test case.

That is, there is need for setting up the context and restoring the system back to known state.

And what's even better - we found out that we needed some more information to the web page, namingly ID tags for certain entries. And then we went to the programmer who implemented it. As if the programmer had not thought the importance of identifying objects in the page.

Hearing comments like these, althought hidden behind the words, makes me to think that there has been a lot of learning.

One of the random thoughts I heard and liked the most was something along the lines that 'we are making the test pass and then we are ready.' Interesting thought. And it seems like that. And it could be like that. No, wait. It should not be like that.

If we are implementing an example and make it pass, how do we know that it verifies the right thing? What if something changes and the example does not highlight the change?

No. When implementing a test (let it be executable specification, unit test, or any scripted test) we have to make sure to make it fail before moving to the next test. And to fail in a way we know that it is failing for the right reason. There is a reason for having 'make it red' in the famous TDD cycle. And it is all that important for ATDD/BDD cycle.

As the saying goes: "make it red, make it green, make it clean". We did end up working on all phases. Good for us!

So, thank you all for speaking your thoughts out loud! And for the learning experience we had together.

To not pollute this blog entry about technical details, I will be posting my learnings of our use of Watir in my next blog post.