Introduction to Test Automation Framework

The biggest challenge the software developer’s facing is building quality products within the timespan and cost constrain. The quality software need to be a bug free one. So to make sure the quality of the product everyone using testing. In many software projects most of the time we are giving importance to test new developments and we are neglecting the regression testing (Regression testing is a testing that verifies that software that was previously developed and tested still performs correctly after it was modified and make sure the system still meets its requirements). The reason for neglecting the different type of testing is time or cost constrains. Due to this they end up with bad quality products. To avoid this circumstance and to simplify the testing, most of the companies today moving towards the automation testing.

What is a Framework?

Framework is a conceptual structure to provide guidelines to build something useful manner. Frameworks give us a layered structure indicating what kind of works we can do and how its inter related.  In computer system it’s indicating what kind of program we can build and how can interrelate. Basically is set of protocols, rules and standards. 

Let us move on to our topic.

What is Test Automation Framework?

Test Automation Frameworks is an execution environment for the automation test scripts. It has set of guidelines for coding, test data handling, precondition handling, report handling etc.…. if we followed those we can get beneficial outcome. By using Test Automation Framework we can get more benefits. Those are:

• Increase the reusability of code and ease of scripting
• Need minimum manual intervention
• Low cost of maintenance
• Easy to handle test data and reporting
• Increase scalability, modularity and understandability  

What is Automation Testing?

Automation Testing is a process in which Automation Tool is used to execute pre-scripted test cases in controlled and desired manner to make sure the system works as expected before it is released into production. In  general Automation Testing is process of automating a manual test process which is already in place in system. 

Automated testing is important due to following reasons:

• Manual Testing of all work flows and  all fields is time and cost consuming
• It is difficult to test for multi lingual sites manually   
• Automation does not require mutch Human intervention. You can run automated test overnight
• Automation increases  speed of test execution
• Automation helps increase  Test Coverage
• Manual Testing can become boring and hence error prone.

Which Test Cases to Automate?

Test cases to be automated can be selected using the following criterion to increase the automation ROI

• High Risk - Business Critical test cases
• Test cases that are executed repeatedly
• Test Cases that are very tedious or difficult to perform manually
• Test Cases which are time consuming