I am happy to announce that Nightwatch.js is now officially a part of BrowserStack. As an open-source project, this means that its development is now a lot more secure, and its future is in excellent hands. BrowserStack has proven itself as the leading cloud infrastructure provider for both live and automated testing on desktop and mobile devices.
It also means that now Nightwatch is maintained by a full dev team and is one of the main responsibilities of the Open-source Program Office that BrowserStack has assembled recently. I have also joined this wonderful group where I’ll be working together with other Selenium and Nightwatch contributors. Our vision stays the same: to ensure that Nightwatch is the go-to solution for all cross-browser automated testing needs.
At the same time, BrowserStack is fully committed to support the entire Selenium ecosystem and so Nightwatch will still continue to work well with all Selenium-based cloud services. As for the day-to-day operations, we will be continuing to develop Nightwatch as an autonomous open-source project, in the same manner as for the past 8 years, but with the support of the world’s leading software testing platform.
Our mission remains the same – to enable software and test engineers to test their applications as quickly and as reliable as possible. I’ve never really believed in the promise of configuration possibilities. I don’t think that anyone really enjoys configuring tools and installing plugins, especially when they need to write automated tests.
That’s why Nightwatch aims to bring to the table a highly integrated solution, already packed with the right set of supporting libraries that work without any additional config needed, and written in the language that all web browsers know best – JavaScript. And since we’ve always favoured collaboration instead of competition, Nightwatch has been designed to make use of more than a decade long of experience from the Selenium project and to implement the industry standard W3C WebDriver API. Doing it any differently not only seems impractical, but it just doesn’t make sense to us.
No matter the sailboat, sailing is all about the wind they say. Maintaining open-source software is like that in many ways. Even though I don’t know the first thing about sailing, the wind is a free natural resource and available to everyone to use. From the beginning, Nightwatch has got either good or moderate wind conditions. Now it has received a strong boost and I’m very excited to see it continuing its journey at a much better speed and sailing conditions.