Test Automation Architecture intro

As promised, I’m working on a series of posts digging deeper into the architecture I started describing at the Selenium Conference a couple of weeks ago. I had hoped that the videos of the talk would be up before I started on the series. I know that people are working on making them available, so hopefully they’ll be posted to the SeleniumConf YouTube channel soon. In the meantime, the slides from my talk are available on Slideshare.

I’ve started to plan out the ground that I want to cover in these posts. This mind map shows my current thinking. Each leaf is probably a separate post.


One issue that I’m running into though is the lack of a good site to use as a test platform. I can’t use the website from my day job as I can’t share the test code directly for that, and there aren’t public instances available anyhow. I considered extending the code I pulled together for the SeConf Twitter challenge, and may yet do that, but Twitter had enough spam prevention measures that I ran into during that effort that it’s possible that someone trying to run the code will run into problems. I also likely wouldn’t generally use Selenium to drive Twitter unless I was specifically testing the site and creating a few GUI focused tests. (Otherwise, I’d use Twitter’s API). I’m going to look around a little more and check out some suggestions I’ve gotten, but if anyone has a suggestion for a good demo site that has at least a few pages and multiple user actions, but doesn’t get too complex or go off into non-HTML, CSS, and JavaScript land (I don’t really want to deal with Flash or Silverlight or video right now, for example), please leave a comment with your suggestion!

I’m also curious to know what other topics you might want to read about beyond what’s in the mind map above. Is there anything in the slides above or anything that follows off the topics that are already in the mind map that y you’d like to know about? Leave a comment about that too, and I’ll see what I can do!

One comment on “Test Automation Architecture intro

  1. A better approach to cover more scenarios would be to pass test data as parameters to our test function and then assert the expected outcome.

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