[Wtr-general] Handling multiple versions of a website [advice needed]

[John Lolis]

Looking for some feed back on this topic.

To start, I'm attempting to automate a very large and very complex web application. Watir is great at handling all the strange controls (it has some timing issues with frames and modal dialogs, but those are known issues). The problem I now face is how to keep my tests from become outdated in a fast moving environment.

Its simple enough to wrap Watir calls in objects (for example a "Login" object") so that I can write a test case and use "Login(name,pass)" instead of "ie.link(yadayada).click". The problem comes when you have 20+ objects currently (and it will probably grow 10 fold) and all of them contain Watir code. When a new version of the web site comes out I predict tracking down the problems (and adding switches to handle old versions) would quickly make the project unmaintainable.

Has anyone thought of a good way of managing such changes? Do you make one giant 'mapping' class and just update that as needed? Do you store the Watir calls and generate code around them? 

Any insight from someone who has been through this would be great :)
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