Okay, that was easy!

I have three separate Watir scripts written to open IE and:

1. Automatically login with a valid test username and password
2. Login with a valid username and invalid password
3. Login with a non-existent username

Manually each of these procedures take about 25 seconds. Running these using Watir from my ruby editor takes about 5 seconds. That’s 5 times faster!!!

If I estimate that I need to log into that app 100 times today to do my manual testing, I’ll be spending 8 minutes logging in rather than  42 minutes. I’m already going to save aproximately 2,000 seconds or 33 minutes of wasted time (it took less than 5 minutes to write the scripts). Multiply that by 10 developers and that’s a savings of over 5 hours per day! That could be another feature.

I’m changing some untested code today and I want to make sure I’m not breaking things as I go, but I don’t want to slow down my development because timelines are tight.

I’m going to use Watir and WatirRecorder (was WatirMaker) to help speed up my manual testing through the user interface. If that goes well I might add some asserts where it makes sense. If I have time I’ll check out WatiN as well.

I’ll write another post to let you know how it went.