Thanks to the Communities

I belong to several communities - Agile Testing group, Watij group, MSDN Software Testing Forum, etc. I just wanted to blog a quick thanks to all the active members of these communities. Just in the past 6 days, I have:

• Gotten help getting Watij up and running and implemented
• Gotten sample code to write a tool which dismisses error dialogs that are popping up in our automation
• Gotten answers to several other questions

Engineering is tricky. Civil engineering is a moving field, but it moves a lot slower - advances in concrete, paving techniques, etc are probably all documented somewhere in a journal each month. Changes in technology? Rapid pace! I don't think any of us could keep up with all the platform, open source, commercial tools, and techniques which change over time. But by having these communities, we are able to give each other a leg up.

Take my dialog dismissal app... We're building automation in Selenium RC (Java). There's an issue in Selenium's Chrome browser that you cannot permanently accept a cert. Every our automation switches into SSL, we get the warning. Until today we have been unable to run all 350 tests in one setting because none of us wants to dismiss that dialog 1000 times. With some sample code from Michael Johnson via the MSDN Software Testing Forum, I put together a quick C# app that watches for and dismisses this dialog. Problem solved, and for the first time ever, we can run our automation end-to-end.

Thanks folks, for all the effort! We make each others' jobs easier this way. Kudos to everyone who puts in time and effort on open source tools like Watij, Selenium, TestNG and the likes, too.

John O.