How to Create watir Frame work ?

One common challenge I see over and over again is people figuring out how to design a logical and maintainable automated testing framework. I have designed quite a few frameworks for various projects, but one thing that has consistently been a win for me is purposely separating test case and test execution design.

It’s therefore logical that the design of my Watir framework deliberately separates test case design and test execution design so that:

■test case design is done visually in spreadsheets; and
■test execution design is done in ruby methods, because code is the most efficient and maintainable way.
Since I last published details about my framework on this blog, I have started doing assertions using the Test::Unit ruby library. The reasons I chose Test::Unit are:

■it is easy to ‘mix-in’ Test::Unit assertions into modules of ruby code using include Test::Unit::Assertions;
■it is included with ruby;
■ruby scripts with Test::Unit::TestCase are instantly executable, in my case, from SciTE;
■its assertions are easy to understand and use.
I have also made some other improvements to my framework code, including:

■the ability to specify browser types, and spreadsheet sources, as command line arguments (with defaults);
■logging test output to a file;
■no longer attaching to an open browser, the same browser instance is used completely for all tests (and elegantly closed at the end).
The main design has been kept the same, in that a spreadsheet (either excel, openoffice or Google Docs) contains tests grouped by functional area, which call a method in a particular module.

The great thing about my framework is that adding a new test is a matter of designing the test case, and then writing the ruby method: as the methods are called dynamically from the spreadsheet, no extra glue is needed!

Enough talk, here’s the code. The Google spreadsheet is here. You can find a .zip file of all the required files to run it here. It runs on the depot app, which you get here. You will need two gems: Watir (oh duh), and Roo.