Design And Implement Of Automation Test Framework For MVC GUI Based On Robot Framework

The increasing competition of global software technology causes the development cycles ofsoftware product become constantly shrinking. Nowadays, the software automation testingdetermines the speed of technological development to some extent. GUI (graphic user interface), asone of the important branches of software testing, gradually achieves functional test automation.But for now, for the GUI, especially for the MVC GUI automation testing there is still no unifiedtest framework and standards. This topic is a sub-project of the Cisco CE340product R&D project.CE340is an enterprise-deployment equipment with well-developed GUI system. Users can do thesystem configuration through command line or graphical interface. In this CE340R&D project, myresponsibility is to drive the comprehensive automation test for its GUI system from prototype toacceptance. According to the valuable test experiences in CE340project, a set of GUI automationtest method has been continuously summarized, based on Robot Framework.This article proposes an automated test framework for MVC GUI module based on RobotFramework. The view,“the function requirement directly determines the properties of controls onpages, and through classifying the control by function, the overall function of GUI can be dividedvery effectively” is proposed, and based on the MVC GUI function division, the GUI automationtest framework is divided into four aspects: user interface function testing, information set functiontesting, information query function testing, and special items testing. On the test plan formulation,this design framework unifies the process of requirements analysis, use case development and testscript writing; On the reuse aspect of the test script, by unified management and using of keywordslibraries, the repeated code can be avoided effectively; On the fault tolerance of the test script, byinserting Setup and Teardown process, completely avoid the script dependency; On the flexibilityof the test code, by writing Python scripts, make whole test adapt to the ever-changing test objectand environment.At the same time, this paper takes OpenWRT LuCI module as an example, carries on theconcrete implementation of framework, and verifies the applicability of this framework through theanalysis of test results. The main contribution of this article includes：(1) Propose an automation test framework for MVC GUI module, which is based on RobotFramework;(2) Propose four function test modules with detailed process definition by extending thetheoretical definition ofAtif’s EIG GUI model;(3) Verify the applicability of this automation test framework by taking OpenWRT LuCI asthe implementation module.