All About Test Automation Frameworks

Test automation frameworks is a common word quite heard in the corridors of software companies. The term framework indicates a rules, guides and best practices to create and design test cases. A framework will have a set of practices or guidelines and tools to help the QA testers to execute the test easily and perfectly. Coding standards, test data handling methods, object repositories, storage of data etc will come under these guidelines.

However, a tester has the freedom to write the test scripts without following these guidelines but there are several benefits to following them. Below given are some of the advantages of using test automation frameworks.

• Test efficiency can be improved
• Maintenance cost can be reduced
• Manual interventions can be minimized
• Test Coverage can be increased to maximum
• Codes can be reused.

There are different types of test automation frameworks and let us go through them in brief.

Module Driven Testing Framework

This type of framework is based on the OOP concept, abstraction. The entire test will be divided into logical and smaller modules and the test scripts will be written for each module. Each module will be independent.

Library Architecture Testing Framework

This is more or less same as the module driven testing framework. The major difference is that here the division will be into functions and the scripts for common functions can be reused anywhere in the test without rewriting the same.

Data Driven Testing Framework

This test automation framework is used when multiple tests have to be carried out in the same application with different data. Here the data will not be embedded in the test script but store in an external source thus separating test script logic and test data from each other.

Keyword Driven Testing Framework

Keyword Driven Testing Framework can be considered an extension of Data Driven Testing framework. In this type of test automation frameworks, a set of test scripts codes also will be stored in an external database along with the data. These set of codes are called as keywords and can be reused.

Hybrid Testing Framework

The name itself says more about this type of test automation frameworks. A combination of two or more of the above-mentioned testing frameworks is called as a hybrid testing framework and it has all the advantages of the individual frameworks which are combined together to form it.

Behavior Driven Development Framework

Behavior Driven Development Framework is mostly used by the business analysts, developers and testers to read and understand the functional validations easily. When using this type of frameworks, there is no need that the user should have the knowledge in the programming language.