How did you guys ever come up with such a clever idea as eV?

[softqa]

How did you guys ever come up with such a clever idea as eValid?

[eValid]

How did you guys ever come up with such a clever idea as eValid?

Thanks so much for the kind words! Always happy to hear positive comments.

The interesting thing about "clever ideas" is that most of them didn't seem to be that clever at the outset. It doesn't really seem reasonable that someone could say, "Hey, why don't we...(fill in anything here)!" and have his colleagues say, right away, "Wow, that's clever!"

Instead, it seems that what happens is that you are faced with a need or a want and out of the necessity of the moment you think up a solution that might work...it's only later that someone decides that it's clever.

The case with eValid is similar: Over 10 years ago we were trying to test our very early website using the TestWorks client-server Xwindows based capture replay system called CAPBAK/X, running on a SUN Sparc machine with an early version of Netscape (remember Netscape?). It was awful. It was a mess. Netscape was not "Motif compliant" -- which it needed to have been if we wanted to test it in a natural way.

Someone said, "This is awful...there must be a better way? What we really need here is to put the test driver inside Netscape, not try to drive it from the outside." At the moment it seemed just the obvious thing to do -- but of course nobody had a clue how to do that.

After several false starts and a lot of discarded code, however, we did finally built the earliest eValid prototypes that really did do the test driving from inside the browser. To say that the approach was more difficult that we thought it would turn out to be is a very big understatement. It is VERY hard to do what eValid does. Much harder than we thought.

So, thanks for the comment and enjoy! eValid is fairly well built out, now, even though there are several aspects still a-building.

The eValid Team