What you'll learn
- Brief introduction to Robot Framework
- Creation of Robot scripts in TCD
- Comparison of coverage and execution metrics
In the previous tutorial, we covered data-driven automation with TCD and made a quick note that the efficient script-based approach is also possible. So, we wanted to explore that topic more and give the spotlight to integrating TCD with Robot Framework.
Robot Framework is an open source test automation framework for acceptance testing and acceptance test-driven development. It follows different test case styles − keyword-driven, behaviour-driven and data-driven − for writing test cases.
Some of the key Robot Framework advantages include ease of installation and use, good support for both external libraries and built-in/custom keywords, and more readable & maintainable test cases.
Tutorial Scope
One of the most common concerns we hear from clients is:
“Our current tests are good enough. Why invest the time and resources in adopting the Test Case Designer methodology if it doesn’t move the needle?”
That may be true, but we don’t have to guess - TCD Analysis capabilities allow us to make a pretty accurate comparison (you can learn more here). For this tutorial, we will use 2 test suites created for the same requirement/coverage goal:
- "TCDBookingTests", representing the optimized output from TCD with 15 tests
- "TypicalBookingTests", representing the manually designed suite with 33 tests (based on our experience, it shows an example of a "pretty good job" for the manual effort type)
The requirement is:
- providing different combinations of booking details at https://www.trip.com/
- validating that clicking the "Search" button successfully leads to the "Results" page (by "properties found" page content)
We will first describe the integration steps for "TCDBookingTests" and then compare the coverage and execution metrics between the two.
Integration Steps
As mentioned above, this tutorial demonstrates the approach where "complete" Robot tests in Gherkin style are generated from TCD. A data-driven implementation similar to the other 3 tutorials is also possible via a CSV/pipe-delimited data table exported from the TCD Scenarios screen + the Test Template in RF (or using a specialized library).