The need for test automation has exponentially increased over the last few years to keep pace with the frequent changes and enhancements to systems, whatever the line of business. While it is critical that these upgrades to systems be thoroughly tested, it is also crucial to do so quickly to enable faster implementation. Automated functional testing has evolved from the early days of the so called record-and-playback to robust keyword-driven frameworks, resulting in benefits of scalability, better performance and testing, and increased productivity. However these traditional test automation techniques using only functional decomposition and data driven approaches have posed many considerable challenges that prevent achieving the complete benefits of creating and implementing these frameworks.

The response to these challenges was Business driven test automation. Business driven test automation enabled the subject matter experts to be an integral part of the test automation process in almost the same way as a technical automation expert. A close watch on the industry trends in test automation shows that the market has rightly moved in to create products and tools that implement the features of business process and reuse. This has not only reduced dependency on the extremely acute resource pool of automation experts, but also ensured that test coverage is maximized.

Currently available techniques and methodologies of business driven test automation still posess some gaps.

The authors suggest the following approach to address these gaps, and augment and accelerate the test automation process.

• Key concepts like
  • platform-independent test case modeling
  • business abstraction layer using Object Logical names
  • division of labor and
  • enhanced reusability
• Enablers like
  • Business element modelers
  • robust scripting engines for multiple platforms
  • keyword function libraries and
  • Document generators.