Zeliko Filipin has posted a bunch of podcasts with AWTA workshop participants, including yours truly and Janet Gregory. I knew at the time that I wasn’t grasping all the information in every presentation, and listening to the podcasts reminds me of what didn’t quite register at the time. There are so many possibilities for test automation, and I need to make sure I learn about as many new frameworks and tools as I can, as more and better ones become available.
I invested a lot of time over the past few weeks upgrading to the latest version of Watir and getting the scripts and suites working in Vista. The silver lining was getting a bit familiar again with Ruby. We don’t do a lot of new stuff with these scripts, so my skills (such as they are) were rusty. It’s personal technical debt to let that happen, on top of the technical debt of scripts that weren’t updated to work properly with new code. But now my technical debt burden is lighter.
Next on my personal task board is to upgrade to the latest FitNesse. We’re on a very old version, and I know Uncle Bob Martin has made a lot of improvements lately, including the ability to use Slim instead of Fit underneath. I get overwhelmed trying to keep up with tools (someone asked me at AWTA about the overhead of using multiple test tools, and it’s true) but I have to invest time in that. The ROI demands it.
One comment on “A Look Back at AWTA”
Slim has some nice features, I immediately wanted to try out. Unfortunately getting the time to do so in a stressed business (at work) is always a bit tricky. Especially I like the Scenario tables, which will be included in the Febuary release of FitNesse. Keep me updated on your insights with it, since I would also try these out during the next few months, probably