Accelerating Test Automation through a Domain Specific Language

• Published in: 2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST) pp. 460 - 467
• Main Authors: Dwarakanath, Anurag, Era, Dipin, Priyadarshi, Aditya, Dubash, Neville, Podder, Sanjay
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.03.2017
• Subjects: Automation; DSL; Java; Natural languages; Programming; Selenium; Test automation; Xtext
• DOI: 10.1109/ICST.2017.52

Test automation involves the automatic execution of test scripts instead of being manually run. This significantly reduces the amount of manual effort needed and thus is of great interest to the software testing industry. There are two key problems in the existing tools & methods for test automation - a) Creating an automation test script is essentially a code development task, which most testers are not trained on, and b) the automation test script is seldom readable, making the task of maintenance an effort intensive process. We present the Accelerating Test Automation Platform (ATAP) which is aimed at making test automation accessible to non-programmers. ATAP allows the creation of an automation test script through a domain specific language based on English. The English-like test scripts are automatically converted to machine executable code using Selenium WebDriver. ATAP's English-like test script makes it easy for non-programmers to author. The functional flow of an ATAP script is easy to understand as well thus making maintenance simpler (you can understand the flow of the test script when you revisit it many months later). ATAP has been built around the Eclipse ecosystem and has been used in a real-life testing project. We present the details of the implementation of ATAP and the results from its usage in practice.