In the modern software industry, Automation is becoming a must-have feature for the testing teams to quickly test and certify builds and find the bugs. To achieve the above criterion, a good automation framework is required. Now, what do we mean by a good automation framework? Let me quickly guide through some of the features that an automation framework must have.
1. Simple Test Cases: The testcases for an automation framework must be simple. The objective of each testcase must be clear and unambiguous. The reason for this being, debugging a multipurpose testcase is going to be hard.
2. Modularity: The automation scripts and test data must be handled separately. This makes it easier to modify the data or scripts without changing the other. You can store your test data in form of an Excel sheet or an XML, depending upon your preference.
3. Reusability of Code: Try to reuse the code as often as possible. The Page Factory model of selenium being one such example. The reusability of key code saves you a lot of time and effort in writing the code for multiple testcases. You can create separate utility classes which can have the common methods such as reading from the excel or logging in to a website.
4. Low Maintenance: The automation framework should be easy to maintain. By making the code reusable and modular you can achieve this goal. The test data must be stored separately and must comply with the coding standards. Proper versioning should be followed for the code to track through different versions.
5. Extensibility: An automation framework can be ideal only when you can easily add new features and testcases to it without altering the framework. Once again modularity proves a pivotal role in achieving this goal.
6. Robust and Reliable: The framework should not crash or provide unambiguous results. The reliability of the results is a must for a good framework. Special measures should be taken to minimize the false cases.
7. Reporting: Any automation framework is incomplete without proper reporting. All your effort goes in wain if you do not get a proper report at the end of the day telling what ran and what failed. The automation report should be simple and must have just enough information for a failed test case to identify which step failed exactly.
8. Documentation: Whatever you do, make sure to document it. Documentation helps you the new guy understand how this framework functions and you can revisit it in future to see why a method was written as such.
If you follow the above 8 rules, you can write a good framework regardless of the language and tool you use for testing.
