Open source test tools are the way of the future
As you can tell from my blog, I am a big fan of WatiN. One thing that WatiN doesn’t do is test non IE stuff. Well as part of .net 3.0 Microsoft has now shipped API’s that allow testing of Windows apps, including both legacy Win32 and WPF applications. There is an MSDN article on how to do this here.
So what does this mean? It essentially means that commercial tools are dead in the long term. If it is possible for a single developer to build tools that work better than commercially available tools costing hundreds or thousands of dollars, which it currently is. It won’t be long until they are not purchased any longer.
Another interesting phenomenon is that companies are trying to advertise their tools by adding comments to blogs, such as this one saying things like, you should try tool xxxx.
Sorry but when your commercial tool costs more and does less than the open source alternative, it is time to look for a new product to develop.
Another major irony is that if the open source tool has a bug, or doesn’t have a feature I need, then you can simply open up the code and fix it or add the feature. Most commercial vendors take 4-6 months or more to investigate, test and resolve issues.
So if you haven’t yet, download a copy of WatiN, WatiNRecorder, nUnit and C# Express, then see what the future is like and join in by submitting back features.
One final word, Webiussoft and Inscif, please stop trying to promote your commercial tools by adding comments to blogs about WatiN, we aren’t changing !
March 23rd, 2007 at 9:37 am
Bruce,
About your article: +1
About that last sentence: ++1
Jeroen
March 23rd, 2007 at 9:52 pm
Don’t forget SWEA. It is so annoying!
June 12th, 2007 at 3:52 am
Teknologika, it is true than promoting commercial tool by adding useless comments to blogs is not a good way. And after thinking about it, I stopped doing this.
If I found interesting posts about testing and if and only if I really have something good to add or a question to ask then I add a comment.
At the same time I have a family and bills to pay, so is it fair that WatiN is free (Life is not fair anyway).
How can we compete with a free tool ?
Is free software a reaction to a market based economy and capitalism ?
Note I am not against open source.
I am thinking about way to give our customers access to the source code of our product for 2008.
Can’t wait for your answer.
June 12th, 2007 at 5:09 am
Frederic,
I am glad to see that you understand you were doing yourself more harm than good with those comments. Now hopefully you will actually put what you said into practice.
How do you compete with open source?
Well you need to have a better product, with better features at a price point that people will pay for. Also you can leverage open source to your competitive advantage as well.
Take WatiN for example, there is nothing stopping a commercial vendor using WatiN as the core playback engine and spending their time to build tools around it. Instead of spending your time working on a low level engine, you can spend your time instead on making the technology accessible to non-developers.
Open source is more than giving customers access to source, it’s about letting the end users define and shape the form that a product will take instead if having the destiny decided for them.
The “killer feature” for me about WatiN has been that it lets me use the tools that I use every day (Visual Studio 2005), and I can add features or make patches to the core code, instead of spending hour after hour working with customer support to get a patch to a problem released at some point in a future release.
Regards,
Bruce McLeod