Adopting keyword-driven testing framework in web-based product development

Abstract

Web applications are abundant in the World Wide Web as well as in the private networks. Organisations resort to using Agile Scrum development to shorten their time to deliver their products rapidly. In less mature Agile organisations, testing is typically done in manual way, with lack of test automation practices at unit, integration, and acceptance levels. Lack of documentations for expected behaviours of existing features is also prevalent. These practices cause long delays in testing for new features and regression testing for existing features. Manual testing consumes a lot of time and may cause some tests to be skipped under time constraints. Undocumented existing features also require back and forth discussions among team members to determine the correct behaviour of the product. We propose to adopt the usage of Robot Framework, a Keyword-Driven Testing (KDT) tool along with Selenium2Library. The framework is to be integrated with existing Jenkins Continuous Integration tool. Leveraging Keyword-Driven Testing framework into Continuous Integration architecture provides a maintainable, reusable, understandable test assets that can be run automatically every time a new build of the product is deployed to multiple target environments. This integrated automated infrastructure allows regression testing to be executed rapidly, without sacrificing test coverage. Rapid feedback from the tests and self-documenting test assets will further improve the productivity and efficiency and ultimately, the quality of the delivered product.