Mark’s Thoughts

The Austin Homebrew Testers started meeting monthly almost a year ago. Most of us knew each other from the software testing community and wanted a place to relax and discuss testing topics. Two projects that we’ve been working on since almost the first meeting had milestone announcements tonight, Rasta and AWUG:

Rasta

At one of the first meetings we discussed using Excel to drive software tests. Hugh McGowan and Bret Pettichord had each implemented solutions that were not robust enough to share. Hugh and Rafael Torres took on the project and provided status reports and previews to the group. I took a look at it last Fall when I was teaching myself Ruby and implemented an example and provided some feedback. Version 0.1.1 was released this evening and more information can be found at rasta.rubyforge.org.

AWUG

The origins of the Homebrew Testers was an informal Watir interest group. At an early meeting, we started talking about forming a formal Watir Users Group in Austin. There have been multiple ideas thrown around over the months, and finally a group is forming. Bret posted the announcement on his blog this evening: Hugh will be presenting Keyword Driven Testing with Rasta at the first meeting this Wednesday.

CITCON

The first meeting of the Homebrew Testers had been announced just before CITCON last year in D/FW. I did not decide to attend that first meeting until I got to know Bret and Jason Darling better at CITCON. This year’s conference is coming up in Denver on April 4-5. It is free to attend and there will be lots of great discussions about various continuous integration and testing topics. It is organized using the open spaces format, so the sessions will be about the topics of interest to the attendees. I’m looking forward to it.