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)

Feeding external data


Tests can be fed data from any external data store such as a database, an Excel, or a CSV file or some external application that returns values dynamically and then can execute over the same data. To demonstrate this concept of test re-use further, we will undertake another exercise that focuses on performing the same task repeatedly. For the sake of the reader, we have abstracted the concepts now as these can then be implemented in whichever manner possible.

Basically, if we are having a set of repeatable tasks specified in a collection of values, then we can perform them in two different manners:

  • Perform the set of tasks repeatedly inside a test for each value

  • Perform the entire test repeatedly for the values

Performing a set of tasks repeatedly within a test

In this scenario, we create a test that takes in the argument or uses a variable containing a list of elements and iterate over it. As a precursor to this, first let us create the file containing the dynamic variable...