Automated functional testing framework based on IBM Rational robot

Introduction: This article introduces the automated functional testing framework built on the basis of IBM Rational Robot to help organize better automated functional testing.

1. Foreword

Testing itself is an unusually hard task, and successful automated functional testing is more difficult for many software development organizations. This article describes the automated functional testing framework built on the basis of IBM Rational robot to help organize better automated functional testing.

2. The challenge of Reality

2.1 Urgent requirements for automated testing

As the business changes, software products are more and more kinds of software products upgrade more and more quickly, in many software development organizations, testing departments are under great pressure, they have to test more and more software products, on the one hand, to deal with the increasingly short test time, but also face the shortage of testing resources.

Each release includes newly added features and existing features that have been tested in previous releases, but need to perform regression testing in this release. In this case, the test department often takes into account that since the test cases for regression tests already exist and have already been performed in the previous version, can the tests be performed automatically in the new version? If so, will greatly save time and resources, the limited resources to the new functional testing, to ease the pressure of testing.

Typically, software development organizations use automated test tools to automate functional testing using recording playback. But recording playback does not solve all the problems.

2.2 Problems in recording playback

Industry experience shows that while recording playback is a quick way to generate tests, it's not enough to simply use recording playback.

First and foremost, the use of recording playback often takes time and resources to debug and maintain scripts. As the number of scripts increases, these workloads may increase to the point where it is almost impossible to maintain the script effectively; second, the recording playback method requires that the application has been developed and that there is no error in the recording, but often when the application reaches this condition there is not enough time to test; With recording playback, each tester is required to use the Test scripting language "programming," while most current software development organization testers focus on the business, often without interest and effort to "program".

Therefore, recording playback does not solve all the problems, in the automated functional testing, need to have the support of the test framework.

3. The Way Out

3.1 Overview

IBM Rational robot is an excellent automated testing tool, and the automated functional testing framework is built on top of robot. The following figure:

Figure 1. An automated functional testing framework based on robot