Software Testing - Ruby/Python adoption as a testing language

Author

Ruby/Python adoption as a testing language

Jim in Oregon

2007-08-25, 7:26 pm

NOTE: I'm not really asking about the merits of either language...so
save the flame war fire, please...

I am a QA Engineer just starting to build a framework for automated
testing. 80% of what we'll be testing is web-based .NET stuff, 20% is
WinForms applications. I'm looking at Python and Ruby. I have more
experience with Python, but Ruby looks intruiging (I've played around
with it some and looked at Watir). My organization has done some work
in Python and none in Ruby, but no one is telling me what to use - its
up to me.

The question I have is...do any of you have a sense for what's used
more in the QA community? Or is it just some of each? I don't want
to invest in Ruby only to find out that five years down the road it is
still used by less than half the numbers of QA people doing Python.

Anyway...thoughts or impressions about the level of adoption in the QA
community would be greatly appreciated.

Jim

Paddy3118

2007-08-25, 7:26 pm

On Aug 25, 6:49 pm, Jim in Oregon <jknowlton...@gmail.com> wrote:
> NOTE: I'm not really asking about the merits of either language...so
> save the flame war fire, please...
>
> I am a QA Engineer just starting to build a framework for automated
> testing. 80% of what we'll be testing is web-based .NET stuff, 20% is
> WinForms applications. I'm looking at Python and Ruby. I have more
> experience with Python, but Ruby looks intruiging (I've played around
> with it some and looked at Watir). My organization has done some work
> in Python and none in Ruby, but no one is telling me what to use - its
> up to me.
>
> The question I have is...do any of you have a sense for what's used
> more in the QA community? Or is it just some of each? I don't want
> to invest in Ruby only to find out that five years down the road it is
> still used by less than half the numbers of QA people doing Python.
>
> Anyway...thoughts or impressions about the level of adoption in the QA
> community would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Jim

http://www.googlefight.com/index.ph...2=%2BQA+%2Bruby
:-)
- Paddy.

sgershon@gmail.com

2007-08-25, 7:26 pm

On Aug 25, 11:37 pm, Paddy3118 <paddy3...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Aug 25, 6:49 pm, Jim in Oregon <jknowlton...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
> http://www.googlefight.com/index.ph...QA+%2Bpython...
> :-)
> - Paddy.
>

Well, if Paddy wants to fight...
http://www.googlefight.com/index.ph...testing+%2Bruby

Seriously though:
If you think you can re-use something of the existant Python structure
of your company, then Pythin can be a good idea.
If you will ever work with any other peer, and you'll have to start
convincing him/her to learn Ruby, then Python seems a good idea again.

If you think you can base your work on Watir, then Ruby is the way to
go -- for Watir can be helpful.
If you want to grab this opportunity to learn a powerful script
language that you'll keep using 5 years from now (even if it is "used
by less than half the numbers of QA people"), go for Ruby.

Alert: I am a bug fan of Ruby. I like the language and the style and
the simplicity. On the other hand, I don't know Python. Keep this in
mind when you weight my suggestion.

One way or another, don't let Ruby or Pythin dominate your testing
activity.
You are the manual tester that can find bugs, and the languages are
only tools -- you may even consider using both langs!

Shmuel

Jared

2007-08-28, 8:52 am

> The question I have is...do any of you have a sense for what's used
> more in the QA community? Or is it just some of each? I don't want
> to invest in Ruby only to find out that five years down the road it is
> still used by less than half the numbers of QA people doing Python.
>
> Anyway...thoughts or impressions about the level of adoption in the QA
> community would be greatly appreciated.

My take at the moment is that probably Ruby and Python are both
finding their feet, but are most frequently found when -

- Someone on the dev team liked Python/Ruby and wanted to try it out
on something ("Testing seems like a safe place").
- A tester has a particular problem that can be solved Ruby or Python
(eg. Watir)

I used Ruby for a heavily tools-based test effort recently using XML
parsers and database connections. While it was fun and I learned a
lot, I did have a fair amount of hesitation. Some of the libraries
feel decidedly unfinished, and at the back of my mind I kept waiting
for some problem to leap out and halt my test effort. The core
language is solid, but Ruby hasn't been popular for a great deal of
time. Having said that, the Rails community is contributing a lot, so
we can expect libraries to get better. Now, we're probably at
something like Java 1.1 or Java 1.2. It's going to take a bit of work
to get things where they need to be.

My Googling leads me to believe that a lot of the Python libraries are
probably in a similar state, or ported from the same codebase as the
Ruby libraries.

My current advice to anyone would be to have a good think about what
you might want to achieve and thoroughly investigate the libraries you
are going to need. This investigation should probably include both
functionality and documentation. This also means committing some real
development time to the effort, and developing a high degree of
confidence in the tools. You might also look for non-critical
projects to try both languages out on.

If I was going to do it again, I might also consider just doing it all
in Java. This would be a much, much bigger learning curve for me and
is one of the reasons I didn't go down this path on the project I
described - A short project, I needed a quick payoff. The benefit
would've been pain saved avoiding library quirks from having better
documentation. And having learned Java.

Jared
http://www.quinert.com/blog/

Sponsored Links