Metadata Driven Automation Development Methodology
This section describes the metadata-driven automation development methodology that enables a test automation engineer to create test automation flows for an Oracle Utilities application.
An application has to be tested for its base functionality and extensions or customization. For this, you can create granular tests or larger end-to-end business test flows. Irrespective of the test design techniques, these tests can be used for regression testing the application in case of upgrades or customization to ensure that the existing functionality is not broken.
Typically, automation development is a time consuming exercise and teams have challenges in knowing and implementing the industry best practices and automation tools that work best for their product technology stack, helping them be successful in their efforts. Few of such challenges are:
• Selecting an automation tool
• Creating the automation framework
• Identifying the automation development methodology
• Ensuring the automated tests are updated for new releases
• Ensuring the coverage levels are up to date
• Configuration management of automated test programs
The metadata-driven automation development methodology provides solutions to such challenges.Metadata-driven automation development methodology
For the Oracle Utilities applications built on Oracle Utilities Application Framework, web service based automated testing is proven to be more robust, maintainable, and faster to develop and execute. Oracle Utilities Testing Accelerator comprises web services and UI based components that enable creation and running of test flows.
The following sections provide the test automation development phases in which an automated test flow is created.
Planning
To plan an automated test flow, identify the business test flow to be automated and the components required for the flow. If necessary, create custom components or extend the delivered components.
For details about how to extend the components, refer to the Copying Components section in Chapter 5: Creating Components.
Design and Development
A flow design explains the order in which the components will be used to interact with each other in the flow. It also defines the test data combinations to use.
To design and develop an automated test flow:
1. Create/extend the required components that are identified in planning phase.
2. Create a test flow in Oracle Utilities Testing Accelerator that maps to the identified business test flow in the application.
For details about how to create a test flow, refer to the Chapter 6: Creating Flows section in Chapter 6: Creating Test Flows.
3. Drag and drop the required components into the flow.
4. Add the test data for the flow.
The test data can be modified at the runtime using the standard Oracle Utilities Testing Accelerator databanks. For more details, refer to Chapter 6: Creating Test Flows.
Test Run
To run the automated test flow, execute the test flow in Oracle Utilities Testing Accelerator workbench.
For more details, refer to the Running Test Flows section in Chapter 6: Creating Test Flows.
The components and test flows developed using this approach are stored and components are version controlled (upto the previous approved version) in the Oracle Utilities Testing Accelerator database. It takes care of the challenges in configuration management of automated tests.