An improved Automated Testing Framework
Guiying Jin, Yingbiao Zhou, Xuyang Tan, Chunlin Gong and Yexin Wang
The 17th IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE 2006) -- Industry Practices (ISSRE 2006)
Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, 6-10 November 2006
Abstract
Abstract - Recently, automated testing is playing an important role in software testing area. The traditional automated testing systems require too much technical skills. In most cases, testers have to be good programmers and write lots of test cases in some programming language by themselves. This paper proposes an improved automated testing framework, with which a tester can works as an end user. Besides the business logic knowledge of the product under test, they don't need to master too much programming skills. On the contrary, testers can easily input the readable test instructions via web GUI (Graphical User Interface), which will be stored in XML format and will be send to some registered testing engines later. Testing engine is responsible for translating the XML instructions into specific test programs and then launching them to be executed. This way, we get a good extensibility, e.g., if you need to run a java (or a Python) writing testing program, then you can develop a java (or Python) testing engine and integrate it with system. With this system, test cases can also be assigned or scheduled to run on different platforms, and can be scheduled to launch based on a predefined time table. At the same time, the status of the testing processes, together with the detailed actions log are recorded for further analysis. Besides, alarms occurred during the testing procedure can be sent to the monitoring platform as an instance message, to the testers’ mail account as an email, or to external SNMP Managers as an SNMP trap. In this paper, the structure of the automated testing system is illustrated. The methodology to store and execute user-input instructions is presented. The extensibility and the load balance are also discussed.