Total Data-driven Test Automation

About Our Testing Service IMT Solutions is one of a leading software companies in Vietnam with exceptional expertise in software

testing, especially test automation. With its strong commitment on continuous improvement to provide

its clients with the service at high quality and competitive cost, the experts of the company developed

and introduced a framework for total data-driven test automation that has been bringing many

successes for the company and its clients. This framework helped to improve the productivity and

quality of the software testing product as well as shorten the test cycles of the software significantly and

this helps to reduce the time to market of the software products.

IMT’ s Total Data-driven Framework

• The Test Cases: This is the regular test cases, in any format and created after investigating the

feature specification and play with the application under test (AUT). The test engineers can use

these test cases to conduct the manual test

• Keyword-driven test cases: the test cases reformatted to the MS Excel format (or other tab-

delimited format) to become “data files” that can be processed by the functions created in the

libraries (utilities, controller, application libraries, built-in libraries) of the selected Automated

Test Tool

• Test Suite: Contain list of the test cases will undergo the automated testing. The order of the

test case in this test suite is also the running order during test execution time. Depend upon the

coverage of the test cycle, the appropriate test cases will be selected to undergo testing

• Driver Script: Perform initialization (load library, initialize variables, GUI Map loading and

definition, etc) and then process the test suite to know list of test cases needed to undergo

testing and pass them to the controller

• Controller

– Read and process the keyword test cases

– Matches on “Keywords” contained in the input-file

– Call the functions in Utilities or Application Library associated with the “Keywords”,

passing the created parameter list

• Utilities

– Process input parameter-list received from the “Controller” script;

– Perform specific tasks (e.g. press a key or button, enter data, verify data, etc.), calling

functions in “Application Library” if required;

– Report any errors to a Test Report for the test case;

– Return to “Controller” script;

• Application Library

– List of application-specific functions, can be called from Controller or Utilities

The functions in this library can also call some generic functions in utilities (math, string

processing, comparison, conversion, etc)

Success Stories By using this framework, IMT has been receiving many acknowledged achievements in the performance

and value of the testing service it has been providing for the clients. The following are some typical

success stories that this framework helped the company to achieve comparing to the traditional test

automation approach that requires skillful test engineers, lots of time and effort.

• 2/3 or more of the team members can be junior engineers with minimum training required. The

trainings are only primarily focusing on some basic knowledge and practices such as: The

products, overview about test automation and automated test tool to be used, and how to

convert from test cases to pseudo-code test cases

• Use the same set of test scripts for different releases/ versions of the AUT. We only need to

have different sets of keyword-driven test cases for each release/ version

• A team of 12 test engineers was be able reduce with only 2 (one expert, one junior) to execute

and maintain the scripts for different release of the (compare to 1/3 to ½ of the team in the

pass)

References • Just Enough Software Test Automation, Daniel J. Mosley

• Black-Box Testing - Techniques for Functional Testing of Software and Systems, Boris Beizer

• Software Testing, Ron Patton

• Effective Software Testing, Elfriede Dustin

• Some other online sources from the internet