TestArchitect

FEATURE ARTICLEWhat is often misunderstood is that automatedtesting is not the same as automating manualtesting. For automated testing to be successful,tests need to be designed with theirautomation already in place. In myexperience, it is this simple missing factor that isthe source of many test automation failures.To tackle automated testing we have come upwith a vision that consists of three elements: an effective keyword-driven methodfor test design and automation calledAction Based Testing a toolset to support―TestArchitect―thathas all the features commonly found intest tools including a shared repositoryorganization and flexible web-based"dashboards" for managing testprojects. However, this article will onlyfocus on Action Based Testing aspects a set of guidelines and best practicesthat can be found at our website,www.logigear.com/hans/Do you need TestArchitect to do Action BasedTesting? Not necessarily. In fact, a simpleinterpreter written in the scripting language of atest playback tool can do the job quite well.The outline of such an interpreter would consistof:“repeatread a test linelook up the keywordexecute the function mapped tothe keywordwrite results in the result fileuntil no more test lines”TestArchitect, however, was developed tofacilitate Action Based Testing testdevelopment. It organizes the test modules andthe actions, and has tools similar to a test editorto quickly create the action based tests. Alsopopular is the feature of “action definitions”,where existing actions can be used to createnew ones without additional programming.Action Based Testing method was a conceptdevised 16 years ago as a complex yet verycritical project that is now widely used insoftware testing. The tests are clustered in “testmodules”, and are described as a series of“actions” varying from inputting a value,clicking a button or capturing and verifying avalue. The actions are named with “actionkeywords” or “action words” and havearguments for the input and expected outputvalues. Part of a test module is also a set of“test objectives” that detail the goals of thetest. Action Based Testing contains manydirections on how to determine the testmodules and the test objectives, but that fallsbeyond the scope of this article.A key concept in Action Based Testing is thatthe automation efforts don't focus on the testsbut solely on the actions as named by theiraction words. In most projects a relatively smallset of actions can be used to describe a largeset of tests. The result is that the tests arereadable for humans and at the same time arefully automated. The automation is verymaintainable, since in the case of a change inthe system under testing generally only theimplementation of one or more actions has tobe modified; most of the tests can be leftalone.www.logigearmagazine.com Page 4 of 14 January 2011 | Volume V