Call it coincidence, but it is exactly seven and half years since the last release of WET ! It didn't occur to me that seven and half years later, I would be writing up about why WET didn't progress any further! My team was enthused when we release the beta of WET 1.0 and the only path we thought we would go with WET was North. We had been burning the midnight oil, set up a thorough continuous build integration process (Well in those days, it was not as common as and my team was really excited to be a part of a small group of elite developers who were doing it) and had worked quite hard to get WET 1.0 out the door. But destiny had it other ways! While the reason why we couldn't do any further development was a good problem to have, the fact remained that the last public release of WET got pegged to 1.0 beta. It's exactly seven years ago that Qantom had the opportunity to become an outsourced partner to a large networking giant for the SQA of its Unified Communication Server product. Being a small company we had to focus on the revenue earning projects and couldn't focus on WET. This is the part, I believe, where we erred when it came to the development of WET - We never had a proper revenue plan to take WET's development forward. We did work with Thwameva, our sister concern, to offer commercial support but there were no signs of revenue for WET. WET was more of a Scratching a developer's itch and a way for us to say thanks to the glorious opensource community. And without a well defined revenue plan, WET remained stagnant and there was no further development on WET.

During the last few years, there were a few times that I wanted to come and update the home page of WET that it was no longer active but somehow have been putting it off with the hope that someday we would be able to get back to WET and start working on it again. Moreover, the core part of WET was still fully functional and my team was continuing to use it to automate the web management part of the UC server up untill recently. And so I put off the thought to update the project web pages of WET to indicate that it is a dead project. Finally, with a heavy heart we decided that we won't be able to do any further development for WET. Given the current range of browser test tools, I don't think it makes sense any more to use WET for automation. In fact, at Qantom we ourselves don't use WET any more for new projects. Instead we use Selenium for web applications. We only continue to use and maintain WET scripts for our older projects that we had already written in WET. That being said, I am tempted to update this page to sadly state that WET is a Dead project. However I will still hold off on doing this for some more time due to the fact that WET still has organs which can possibly be used by other test automation projects in future. To name a few:

• XML Object Repository - Any test automation tool will have to rely on using object properties to identify objects at run time. The XML Repository provides a highly maintanable mechanism for defining and updating these object definitions
• Defintion of tests - The concept used in the test definitions of WET is nifty and offers a reusable and structured way of defining preconditions, transactions and teardowns
• Pretty results - WET's test results were one of my favorites and also loved by our internal clients. The fact that results could be displayed as HTML pages was a big bonus when it came to the test team presenting daily automated test reports to the developers

... and a few more such features. Since WET is released under an opensource license, any budding test tool developer could embed these concepts into his own tool. Hence I will leave the remaining pages of WET as it is in the hope that these are useful to someone.

Before I end, I would like to thank all the erstwhile users of WET who not only supported us during its development but gave us some great testimonials. The mere fact that we had a good following of test automaters using our software was an extremely gratifying tribute to us. I would look forward to developing more tools in future - The lessons learnt from WET will help us do better this time.

Raghu Venkataramana
17th December 2014