At the Ruby Conference, Andy Hunt kicked off with a talk about Ruby 
evangelism. Afterward, I mentioned a common theory about technology 
adoption. It's from Geoffrey Moore's _Crossing the Chasm_, which I reviewed 
here:
<http://www.testing.com/writings/reviews/moore-chasm.html>

Briefly, his book is about the difficulties a technology has making it from 
acceptance by technology enthusiasts and visionaries to acceptance by the 
mainstream. His solution is to concentrate on a niche market. Become the 
obvious mainstream solution in that market, then spread to the larger world.

I observe that the "markets" for CGI scripts and sysadmin scripts already 
have entrenched obvious solutions.

However, the world of testing scripts is not so settled. Those testers who 
script probably use Perl, but there are not so many of them, and I think 
they're not as set in their ways. It would be relatively easy to present 
Ruby as the obvious choice for testing scripting if we (1) had scripts/apps 
for people to use and customize and (2) had a hard core of notice-able 
testers using Ruby.

I've started (2) going. The January/February issue of STQE magazine
<http://www.stqemagazine.com> will have an article by our very own Phil 
Tomson about using Ruby for a testing problem. The following issue will 
have an article about how useful it is for testers to know a scripting 
language. That article uses Perl and bash, but it will get people thinking 
in the right general direction.

Going forward: There's a web site done by the company that does the magazine
<http://www.stickyminds.com/>. I bet I could persuade them to give me a 
"Ruby Gems" column, in which I monthly or so talked about using Ruby to 
solve a testing problem. I have a stagnant website <www.testingcraft.com> 
that could be pressed into service as the place to go to look for Ruby 
testing solutions. (That's not impossibly far from the website's ostensible 
purpose.) I'm fairly well known in the testing world, and I know key 
players well; we could perhaps leverage that. For example, I'd like to 
persuade Florida Institute of Technology (one of the few universities that 
actually teaches testing) to somehow fold Ruby into its curriculum. Lisa 
Crispin and I have started a mailing list on "agile testing"
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/agile-testing>. People reading that list are 
probably predisposed to innovate and join movements.

All that is well and good, but as or more important is (1) - scripts and apps.

So, questions:
1) Who's got code?
2) Who's willing to write code?
3) Who's got success stories to share?
4) Who's got ideas about spreading the word to testers?
5) What are those ideas?


--
Brian Marick, marick / testing.com
www.testing.com - Software testing services and resources
www.testingcraft.com - Where software testers exchange techniques
www.visibleworkings.com - Adequate understanding of system internals