I am very pleased to announce that this week, a new company has been launched. WatirCraft is a software company that will provide products and services in support of the popular Watir open source testing tool. Our goal is to deliver test automation that works --throughout the software lifecycle.

My partner in WatirCraft is Bret Pettichord (the Watir project lead). Bret is widely known in the testing and agile development communities as one of the original authors of Watir, as an early contributor to Selenium, and as co-author of the book Lessons Learned in Software Testing.

I'm announcing this here because many readers of this blog know that for the past ten years, I have been focused on growing ProtoTest.  ProtoTest is not going away - quite the contrary, we have an excellent team and we're enjoying tremendous success in early 2008.  But I will be splitting my time between these two exciting companies in the coming months and years.

Over the last four years Watir has achieved a critical mass in the market that suggests the need for a company like WatirCraft. More than 85,000 people have installed Watir and many have expressed an interest in seeing more resources behind the product and the availability of support services. Bret and I have formed a bond of trust between us about how this kind of company should be run (given the existing Watir project, community, and shared goals.)

WatirCraft’s business model is based on an existing open source project with a broad base of code, where there is a significant community active in software development, and where we can provide subscription-based services to help people be more efficient and effective when using Watir. 

Watircraft will sell annual subscriptions for software and services, plus training and consulting.   Stay tuned for more information.