Approach on designing Web UI test automation framework.

I have been working as a QA all these years and would like to share my experience on it. Worked on many automation tools (mostly used) like  Selenium Web Driver, WatiN,Coded UI and etc,. The question arises when we start working on the tool, like what would be the best approach for designing the framework, and as per the google research results, we see that we have plenty of options, but I consider three important aspects while designing the framework.

• Maintainability.
• Re-usability.
• Readability.

Maintainability: I refer maintainability as,  any design changes from the user interface front, the code should work with a very minimal changes. For example: change in a value of a control identifier.  

Re-usability: Re-using the same code instead of writing again. I see many posts which do not follow this. For example: login in to application which needs entering the data like user name, password and clicking on the button are repeated in many tests.

Readability: Tests should be written in a readable manner in a way that even non-coders should be able read the test and execute them manually (in case of any issues). Test should not have any tool specific code. In up coming posts, I will be showing how we create a framework based on the above three points.