Intro ...

This blog will mainly concentrate on my discoveries\findings and ramblings relating to testing with Ruby\Watir programming scripts.
Firstly a brief overview of myself and why this blog is being set up.

I come from a programming background having graduated studying in ‘C’, still to me the most elegant programming language. Shortly after graduating I moved into Windows programming with ‘Visual Basic 4’ and over the years that followed migrated to and programmed in ‘VB5’, ‘VB6’ and then ‘VB.net’. Also I have been dabbling with C#.

Whist I was working within the telecommunication industry I got my first taste of ‘testing’ but not as you might say in a conventional way. I was tasked with writing the front end of a hardware component testing program. The front end using ‘VB6’ whilst under the hood being written in ‘C\C++’, this turned out to be the most demanding program I had ever written. Whilst I concentrated on the UI I was teamed up with a very talented embedded electronics software engineer. To cut a long story short over the coming 2 years we produced a completely modular self scaling and dare I say user friendly suite of test programs that could adapt and mould not only to the company’s current hardware platform but also to future designs not even yet conceived. Hence when an opportunity came about to move into the testing environment on a more permanent basic I took it. Since that move which happened late 2006 I have more recently started to use the Ruby\Watir programming combination to automate test scripts. This blog is going to be about my successes and failures as I get to grips with this technology.