Design, Implementation And Application Of Automated Web Application Testing Tools

In recent years, more and more software development teams adopt to agile development model. Following this new trend in software engineering field, software automation testing is playing more important role in software development and testing process. As if no automation testing applied in functional or regression testing, it will be very difficult to complete one iteration within2to4weeks. In order to complete heavy automation testing tasks with less human resources, it becomes a MUST to have one robust automation testing framework for this goal.IBM GUI automation testing framework consists of a three-tiered architecture implemented through the app objects, tasks, and test cases packages, the IBM package and supported best practices. The IBM package contains a wealth of code to save time and reduce automation effort. But the IBM framework doesn’t resolve the problem of auto-capture and save GUI element properties and the problem of auto-generate Java code to get and operate GUI element in automated test cases.This project focuses on design, implementation and application of automated web application testing tools which use IBM Rational Functional Tester (RFT) as automation testing tool, to extend IBM GUI automation testing framework. In this article, focuses on how to develop testing tools to gain web GUI widgets’properties and save as XML file, then generate Java codes from the XML file to implement automated test cases. Also it will describe how to use IBM Software Testing Automation Framework (STAF) to batch run automated test cases which composed with Java code. Starting from requirements analysis to implement new testing tools which save XML file and generate Java code automatically, it uses software engineering and Agile development theories to describe this solution in every phase. This paper describes Agile development model, the technical background of IBM GUI Automation testing, testing tool, IBM Software Automation Testing Framework (STAF) and how to apply this solution in IBM Enterprise Content Management (ECM) project.