Successful test automation approach – simplest way to build cost effective automation frameworks which can give better ROI.
To maximize automation benefits in terms of best output and cost effectiveness is by implementing best matching framework based on your product line.
When an organization plans for cost effective automation frameworks, they can always consider 2 types of frameworks to start having maximized results with less effort and cost. Basically optimizing your efforts and get better ROI relatively in less time.
- User acceptance testing – Find out a Behavioral driven development (BDD) framework – either cucumber selenium or Robot Framework. I will explain about Cucumber Selenium framework in this article and will explain the reason for including one BDD Framework for your automation. With the help of Business team, identify the most critical applications and most critical functionalities. Once you have BDD framework is ready, you can make sure it is running every day and sending our reports using Jenkins integration. Which will make your automation is ready to Join the DevOps culture. As most of the companies like google, amazon etc have already adopted DevOps while ago.
- Regression testing – You can follow any regular automation approach and adopting DevOps, continuous testing, monitoring and reporting. You can opt data driven or keyword or hybrid based on your expertise and application type.
Let me give an example when you consider the type 1 which is BDD for acceptance testing.
The very reason for BDD is that it can utilize business user’s collaboration in automation. This is the easiest way to get business team’s association on your automation efforts.
In my opinion, when you compare within different BDDs, cucumber has upper edge as opposed to Robot Framework as simplicity in it that will help business user involve easily.
As an e.g. cucumber frameworks need feature file and typical feature file example will have user scenarios as below,
Feature: Login Action
Scenario: User successfully Login to application with valid user id and password
Given User is on application login prompt page
When User enters User name and password
Then Message displayed as Login is successful
Scenario Outline: data parameter test
When User navigates to application search screen
Then user input “<InputInfo>” as “InputVal”
Examples:
| InputInfo |
| ABC1 |
| ABC2 |
In the above example you can see that a business user can simply follow the format for above 2 test cases which is written in feature file.
1) Scenario
2) Scenario Outline:
Later automation architect or engineer can develop test runner file and convert this as automation test scripts. Please refer link for more details about cucumber framework.
Benefits
- User collaboration
- Due to user collaboration, we can make sure all the critical application are automated
- Due to user collaboration, we can make sure all the critical features in every important applications are automated
- Due to Jenkins integration, you can make sure test can be scheduled for every day run, to make application as robust in terms of quality.