Accelerating Test Automation through a Domain Specific Language

TL;DR

This paper introduces ATAP, a platform that simplifies test automation by enabling non-programmers to create and maintain test scripts using an English-like domain specific language, thereby reducing effort and improving readability.

Contribution

The paper presents ATAP, a novel platform that converts English-like test scripts into executable code, making test automation accessible to non-programmers and easier to maintain.

Findings

ATAP successfully converts English-like scripts into executable tests.

Non-programmers can author and maintain tests using ATAP.

ATAP has been effectively used in a real-world testing project.

Abstract

Test automation involves the automatic execution of test scripts instead of being manually run. This significantly reduces the amount of manual effort needed and thus is of great interest to the software testing industry. There are two key problems in the existing tools and methods for test automation - a) Creating an automation test script is essentially a code development task, which most testers are not trained on; and b) the automation test script is seldom readable, making the task of maintenance an effort intensive process. We present the Accelerating Test Automation Platform (ATAP) which is aimed at making test automation accessible to non-programmers. ATAP allows the creation of an automation test script through a domain specific language based on English. The English-like test scripts are automatically converted to machine executable code using Selenium WebDriver. ATAP's English-like test script makes it easy for non-programmers to author. The functional flow of an ATAP script is easy to understand as well thus making maintenance simpler (you can understand the flow of the test script when you revisit it many months later). ATAP has been built around the Eclipse ecosystem and has been used in a real-life testing project. We present the details of the implementation of ATAP and the results from its usage in practice.