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今天看到Bret Pettichord的这篇文章：
一直以来对英文单词“Harness”的意思都有点模糊，看来这篇文章后清晰了不少。
Harness的英文解释是：
n.
(全套)马具, 系在身上的绳子, 甲胄
vt.
上马具, 披上甲胄, 利用(河流、瀑布等)产生动力(尤指电力)
但是作为IT术语好像有点难翻译。
A test harness is responsible for executing tests and collecting and reporting results.
测试框架负责执行测试并收集和报告结果。(在这里，Harness翻译为框架应该合适！)
好，言归正传，谈谈这篇文章。在这里，Bret Pettichord主要想厘清自动化测试工具中的3个关键组成部分：脚本语言、驱动、框架。
对于Watir而言，Watir本身是驱动（浏览器的驱动）、Ruby是脚本语言、框架则可采用Ruby自带的单元测试框架Test::Unit，或者是Rspec 、Cucumber等，也可以自己开发。
When I started working on , I was pushing a vision for automated testing. This vision still motivates my work with Watir. A couple of years ago, Brian Marick told me open-source developers should share their vision and let the community know why they built the tool. Here's the vision.
There are three essential elements of an automated testing system: language, driver and harness. Your tests need to be written in a language and you need a language to extend your testing system. I've long believed in scripting languages, such as Perl, Python and Ruby. I find that testers are more productive with them and find them easier to understand and use. I have reasons why I prefer Ruby, but there are other good automated testing systems written using other scripting languages. In fact over the years, I have built testing frameworks in Perl, Python and VB, usually building on languages that were already in use at the client. My emphasis on full-featured programming languages was a contrast to the that had been commonly used in commercial testing tool suites. I had no patience for them.
There are lots of languages to choose from. Finding a suitable driver, however, was often more difficult. A driver is what you need to drive your application. Watir is an example of a browser driver, suitable for web applications. Often the driver determines the language you use. Years ago, I used Expect as a driver for a command line application. Expect used TCL as its language, so the suite was written in TCL. I developed Watir because I wanted a browser driver in Ruby. Watir was our solution for Web Application Testing in Ruby.
The third thing you needed for a testing system was a harness. When we started, we all used Test::Unit, a Ruby test harness designed for unit testing. We found that it could be adapted for functional testing. More recently, Watir users have been using Rspec or Cucumber as their test harness. A test harness is responsible for executing tests and collecting and reporting results. Some people like to build their own test harnesses instead of using one of these.
I developed this vision while working with commercial testing tool suites like SilkTest and WinRunner. These packages are often referred to as tools, but I found that they actually comprised a collection of integrated tools. They had predefined usage expectations that often didn't match actual tester needs. Data-driven testing, for example, required us to break down the suite and then reassemble it in a more suitable configuration. I wanted testers to be able to identify the individual tools that made up a testing system.
Many new Watir users have trouble identifying where Watir (the driver) ends and Ruby (the language) begins. But learning this is key to becoming a proficient user. I'm told that some Java teachers don't like their students to use an IDE (such as Eclipse or Netbeans). Instead they want their students to learn to use the required tools separately -- the editor, the compiler. This way they learn the function of each tool. In the same way, I've also wanted testers to understand the functions of the different tools and components used in a testing system.
We often get questions from new Watir users whose answers are obvious once you understand this. Can Watir read CSV files? Can it do date math? Can it read from a database? The answer to all of these questions is that Watir can't do it, but Ruby can. No browser driver could do these things (it would be like asking whether your compiler supports search and replace), but any full-featured programming language can. It's just a matter of finding the library to do it. These questions are raised in the first place because testers are used to using commercial tool suites that were closed systems. So you only got the ability to do these kinds of things if the vendor added it to the package. Watir is part of an open system, so all the libraries are there already and more are being written all the time, often by people who are not part of the Watir community, per se, but rather part of the larger Ruby community.
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