Book Image

Robot Framework Test Automation

By : Sumit Bisht
Book Image

Robot Framework Test Automation

By: Sumit Bisht

Overview of this book

Testing has traditionally been a part of software development, and has always involved a lot of manual effort. It can be automated with Robot Framework, which offers numerous benefits from cost saving to increased quality assurance in the software delivery. This book will help you to start designing test suites and Automated Acceptance Tests. Helping you to get started with automating acceptance tests, this book will provide a detailed overview of acceptance test management practices and principles. You will also be introduced to advanced techniques that you can use to customize the test suite, along with helpful tips and tricks to extend and leverage it in a wide variety of scenarios. Starting with a detailed explanation of the need for automated acceptance test driven development, this guide will help you with an empty test project creation and execution for proof of concept, and validation of installation. This book will also cover the Robot Framework in detail, and will help you test desktop applications using Java Swing. You will gain an in-depth knowledge of tricky activities, such as setting up a test environment and using it with Selenium. You will also learn about other popular libraries, and how to test network protocols, web services, and databases. This book will cover the entire Robot Framework with real- world practical material to make its content informative and interesting. By the end of this book you will be able to write acceptance tests for desktop and web applications, as well as know how to extend acceptance testing in other scenarios that are commonly devoid of tests, and present the results appropriately.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Test file structure


So far, it has been demonstrated that whitespaces play an important role in configuration files. The test configuration is written in a tabular format with each column having separate elements such as test element. The Robot Framework allows flexibility in specifying the separations among the different columns in a test file as well as supporting different formats for the test files, which you can choose at your discretion. Note that depending upon the file extension; a suitable parser is selected during runtime. Some of the supported formats are as follows:

  • HTML

  • TSV

  • Plaintext

  • Piped text

  • RestructuredText

HTML format

In an HTML format, the HTML is read, which comprises of different tables for different portions of the test configuration. For each table, the first heading element is read and based on this information; the rest of the table is understood. A word of caution! Any data that is outside the recognized table is discarded. You can understand this better with the help...