Initial thoughts for an automation testing framework/utility

My first exposure to selenium was in 2010/2011 & I was quiet impressed with it, the way you can use selenium for the testing of web application was totally awesome. At that time I was working with xebia,  our team was working for website revamp of a dutch travel company. We were using selenium for all the regression & functional testing of website, 80% of the website testing was done only by Selenium.

One of the challenge with selenium is that for each test scenario you have to write code for that & if you don’t manage your test scenario/cases effectively, the management of selenium test cases becomes a task in itself. At that point of time also we tried to make maximum use of Java to make selenium test cases as structured & Object oriented possible so that they can be extended & managed easily. I always had a desire to do some improvement in that area so that the selenium test cases management should be made more easier.

In my current company most of the testing is done manually, since I had a prior experience of Selenium & experienced the power it brings to your testing. I was pretty determined to bring the selenium advantage in our company. Off-late an automation testing was set-upped in our company as well which was working on leveraging the power of selenium in testing, but again it was same problem you have to write a lot of code. The other challenge that automation team was facing, the UI of the site was changing very frequently so whatever work they used to do was becoming back to zero after few iterations.

Last week along with my team I’ve started doing some head banging that let’s see if can do something out of the box, in a normal discussion with my team members one idea stuck to us. The manual QA team of our company is very strong & they have complete in & out of idea of whole application, but they have so much work assigned to them that they can’t spend their time in the selenium. We wanted to club the knowledge of our manual testing team & the power of selenium.

As a POC we buit a very simple utility that will read a meta information file and executes the commands listed in that meta file. As an example if they want to open a page one of the line of meta file will contain a command “open url”, similarly if they have to click a button the command will be something like “click . This utility was doing exactly what we wanted to do. We are still in the POC phase where we are trying to include as much commands as possible

Let me know about your thoughts for this approach, suggestions are most welcome.