From last few years, on and off, I am investigating to develop Web based application Web User Interface Automation framework design and development. I came up with considerations which should be in order to develop the framework based on my experience.

This is the strategy I aligned to develop the framework using Selenium webdriver, TestNG, Java and Cucumber. Test cases are written in BDD format, framework is integrated in Continuous Integration environment.

I have listed broader categories and break them into sub-section.

Organisation

• Budget – how much organisation willing to spend on R &D and automation
• Automation team size or there skill set to bring into organisation via new hires
• Manual test team size and their skill set
• Competencies of the individual team members
• Software standing in product life cycle – Introduction, Growth, Maturity, Decline, Maintenence
• DevOps, Developers can support in the automation process.
• Encourages open source or licensed tools to use

Application under test

• Technologies used – Programming languages, database etc.
• Architecture of application – 2 tier application, 3 tier application
• End users of applications
• Dependencies of web application with desktop client

Framework design considerations

• Testing approach – TDD, BDD
• Tools selections – Selenium, Sikuli for driving thick client application
• Test data management
• Building libraries of common methods – Create common methods to reuse same methods for multiple test cases.
• Usage of maven
• Object idenrifier and object library Page object model
• Naming conventions – Naming methods, txtbx_UserName, btn_###, lnk__###
• Failure test cases debugging mechanism
• CI Environment considerations
• Maintenance overhead
• Scalable to various web UI applications

Reporting

• Audiences of reports – QA, Dev, PO, Stakeholders, Leadership team
• Report format – HTML, jUnit, Excel
• Using Cucumber reports
• Reports delivery – Email, Web server, Dashboard

Training & Documentation

• Traning materials to train manual testers – For the team who does not have coding experience, they can write test cases, for example, BDD format
• Training materials for BA, Development, Customers etc such that they can run test as and when required