I have been interested in Web Automation for BDD  in Web projects for some time. I have had exposure to Cucumber using Capybara in one .NET project but in truth I always found that running a team of .NET developers on a Ruby code project quite tough.

Recently I have been doing more with Specflow and Watin, specifically on our www.restaurant-sale.co.uk project. The benefit over Cucumber being that through our team we have very little Ruby experience. Indeed we even investigated recruiting .NET developers with Ruby exposure, that proved very difficult! With Specflow and Watin our existing developers have been able to get up to speed much easier.

Also as all our developers are familiar with .NET code, I have been able to enforce all the SOLID principles and comfortably get refactoring working well. Our normal Code Review process has enforced this. Notionally Specflow also seems to run faster than Cucumber with Caybara.

One other annoying thing about Caybara is the fact that you need to run older versions of Firefox. Watin works with IE and other browsers.

I am not saying that this approach is the best for all teams, more that if you have a team wanting to get up to speed with Web Automation for your acceptance tests, getting a .NET team to learn this concept AND Ruby at once is a tough ride.

Realising this is making me wonder about revisiting MSBuild rather than Rake scripts for my builds. That is another decision though!! I may just use IronRuby and .NET precompiled components.

One thing I will say though is that Web Automation is now more and more accessible to all teams, there are many options so get doing it!