This blog post on creating and using a test automation framework is expected to help anyone with some know-how on Java and Selenium get started with the ever popular “Page Object Model” based test automation framework.

Why Test Automation?

Test automation services, as you know is to help speed up testing when it becomes monotonous and time consuming. Automation can help when we test something repeatedly. Humans are prone to making mistakes while doing monotonous actions.

Automation gets rid of monotony and repeated tasks while doing the following:

Test the same tests with different sets of data

Test with same set of data, on every new build, manually

Test, find bugs, fix, regress, find bugs, fix, regress – cycle of bug fixing

Benefits of Test Automation The benefits are:

It reduces the time to do tests, thus saving manual effort

It runs tests parallelly, thus reducing manual effort for testing

It runs tests with more than one browser, thus saving manual effort

It runs more tests with different sets of data, thus getting better coverage

What is a Framework?

A framework is just a set of rules and structures, which makes it easy to get a suite of tests up and testing in minimal time. For example, assign test data in a specific folder, store configuration settings in a specific file and folder, name the tests in this template, create packages, etc.

Generally a test automation framework

is built for a specific application. But frameworks can be generic as well. The examples for generic framework are:

Linear

Modular

Data Driven

Hybrid – which is a combination of all three above

A test automation framework simply helps you in developing a suite of tests, connecting with the application under test, running the tests against the “application-under-test” in required order and extracting test execution results.

The global Test Automation Market is projected to reach US$ 109.69 bn by 2025. It is clear that there is an increasing demand for Test Automation Services worldwide, as it has become exponentially efficient and saves a lot of time. Apart from periodic implementation and least amount of human effort, the most notable business advantage of test automation is a high level of accuracy.

Software development practice has seen radical changes over the time, so do tools and technologies. These changes are aimed to improve quality, productivity and shorten delivery time.Software testing services evidently plays a vital role in achieving these goals. With the increased demand for test automation especially in the field of IT, and several automation tools available at the disposal, Selenium has been a stand-out in this space. Let’s look into some of the reasons why Selenium is more popular than other tools?

Selenium is an open-source tool used to test web applications. It was originally developed by Jason Huggins in 2004. In 2004, when no one was talking about Agile and DevOps, Selenium was developed keeping in mind agile infrastructure and DevOps workflow. The response for Selenium in the early stages was not good. Since then, it has come a long way and has become one of the most used test automation tools.