The cornerstones of QA Software automation framework

1)????A solid clear manual test cases with low level description of the business flow. ???????????????For example:

• ?"Complete process1 and validate successful results" - is not an automatable test step in a manual Test case.

?????????????However-??????

• ?“Click 1st button at the top left and validate a new Popup with a title – WELCOME” - is an automatable test step.
• ?“Click the YES radio button at the bottom right (a different test case may request the NO radio button to be pressed)” - is not just a good automatable step, but it also allows the QA Automation engineer, to create a parameterized function for 2 scenarios.

2)????An Ideal automated framework should contain 5 main components:

• External (user owned) testing data (MS EXCELL, MS ACCESS, XML, etc.)
• Generic (Global) functions library (Click button, populate edit box, wait an object, etc.)
• Middle-tier functions library to serve business modules tasks (Invokes the Generic\Global functions library)
• Driver scripts - for a batch of a tasks, being part of a scenario (Invokes the Middle-tier functions library).
• Results publishing: ???????

a) Built in log

b) External results publishing (EXCELL, HTML.)

?3)????The QA Automation engineer

• Needs to have a reasonable knowledge of coding - but not to over-doing it.
• Structure, naming convention and business modules management are essential.