Automation Approach

The test automation framework provides the function libraries and the skeleton to start automation of an application. As the AUT changes the automation framework also changes. But there are common automation functions that can be applied irrespective of the application under test. In the Generic automation approach the aim is to identify these common functional libraries and utility functions that can be developed once and used for automation of different AUT that may be developed using different programming languages.

The Generic functional libraries can be classified in to
Basic Object Functions: These are the functions that can be called on many different test objects. These functions are common for standard objects.

Language Specific Functions: These are the functions that can be called on the test object specific to AUT development language. There can be a set of functions for each application development language. For Ex: Set of functions for test objects of Java, another set of functions for .NET, VB, etc.

Utility Functions: The utility functions include the string manipulation functions, array manipulation, file handling functions etc. These functions are useful to manipulate input / output data in the test scripts.

Database functions: The database functions are for executing the database queries from the test scripts.

Reporting or Logging functions: The logging functions are helpful for logging any debug / information messages / variable output to either to text file or to a QTP report file. The Reporting functions are to report the results of the test, Pass, Fail, warning and error.